MALE: Maldives former president Mohamed Nasheed, whose party won a landslide in the archipelago’s parliamentary election, on Tuesday pledged to conduct a thorough probe into deals with China.
Nasheed’s Maldivian Democratic Party (MDP) is set to secure 65 seats in the 87-member parliament, giving it a clear majority to push for reforms including imposing the country’s first income tax and instituting a minimum wage for the first time.
President Ibrahim Mohamed Solih, who is also from the MDP and unseated pro-China leader Abdulla Yameen in September, had urged voters to back his call for an investigation the scale of debts to China, which the party fears could run as high as $3 billion and risks sinking the economy.
The Indian Ocean island chain has been caught in a battle for influence between India and China, which invested millions of dollars during Yameen’s rule as part of its Belt and Road plan, designed to improve Beijing’s global trade reach.
Yameen denies any wrongdoing in relation to the Chinese debt.
Nasheed, the country’s first democratically elected leader between 2008 and 2011 before being forced to step down in a police mutiny, said the result was “a clear mandate to implement” the party’s pledges.
“Some of the first bills that the new parliament must consider is the pending legislation to fully empower the presidential commission on stolen assets, and deaths and disappearances,” MDP leader Nasheed told Reuters in the capital Male.
“The government continues to scrutinize the deals signed by the previous government, many of which, we fear, were subject to large scale corruption. We must allow the government to examine these deals with forensic detail.”
Final provisional results for the election will officially be confirmed on Wednesday, an Elections Commission official told Reuters.
The MDP is just one seat shy of the three-quarters quorum required to amend the constitution in the People Majlis or parliament. This is the first time a party has had such a majority since the first multi-party elections in 2008. The MDP previously ruled in coalition.
The new parliament is expected to be inaugurated in May.
Last month, Yameen spent more than a month in police custody over a graft scandal aimed at siphoning money from the islands’ tourism board. He was released on bail on March 28 in time for the last week of campaigning, and denies the charges.
Maldives ruling party pledges probe into Chinese deals after landslide win
Maldives ruling party pledges probe into Chinese deals after landslide win
- The government continues to scrutinize the deals signed by the previous government, many of which, we fear, were subject to large scale corruption
EU parliament approves 90-bn-euro loan for Ukraine amid US cuts
- awmakers voted by 458 to 140 in favor of the loan, intended to cover two-thirds of Ukraine’s financial needs for 2026 and 2027
The EU parliament on Wednesday approved a 90-billion-euro loan for Ukraine, providing a financial lifeline to cash-strapped Kyiv four years into Russia’s invasion.
Lawmakers voted by 458 to 140 in favor of the loan, intended to cover two-thirds of Ukraine’s financial needs for 2026 and 2027 and backed by the EU’s common budget — after plans to tap frozen Russian central bank assets fell by the wayside.
Military aid to Ukraine hit its lowest level in 2025 as the US pulled funding, leaving Europe almost alone in footing the bill and averting a complete collapse, the Kiel Institute said Wednesday.
Kyiv's allies allocated 36 billion euros ($42.9 billion) in military aid in 2025, down 14 percent from 41.1 billion euros the previous year, according to Kiel, which tracks military, financial and humanitarian assistance pledged and delivered to Ukraine since Russia's full-scale invasion.
Military aid in 2025 was even lower than in 2022, despite the invasion not taking place until February 24 that year.
US aid came to a complete halt with President Donald Trump's return to the White House in early 2025.
Washington provided roughly half of all military assistance between 2022 and 2024.
European countries have thus made a significant effort to plug the gap, increasing their collective allocation by 67 percent in 2025 compared with the 2022-2024 average.
Without that effort, the US cuts could have been even more damaging, the institute argued.
However, the think tank points to "growing disparities" among European contributors, with Northern and Western European countries accounting for around 95 percent of military aid.
The institute calculated that Northern European countries (Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Iceland, Latvia, Lithuania, Norway, and Sweden) provided 33 percent of European military aid in 2025, despite accounting for only eight percent of the combined GDP of European donor countries.
Southern Europe, which accounts for 19 percent of the combined GDP of European donors, contributed just three percent.
To help fill the gap left by the United States, NATO launched the PURL programme, under which European donors purchased US weapons for Ukraine, worth 3.7 billion euros in 2025.
Kiel called the initiative a "notable development", which had enabled the acquisition of Patriot air-defense batteries and HIMARS multiple-launch rocket systems.
European allies are also increasingly placing orders with Ukraine's own defence industry, following a trend started by Denmark in 2024.
War-torn Ukraine's defence production capacity has "grown by a factor of 35" since 2022, according to Kiel, but Kyiv lacks the funds to procure enough weapons to keep its factories working at full capacity.
Orders from 11 European donor countries helped bridge that gap last year.
In the second half of 2025, 22 percent of weapons purchases for Ukraine were procured domestically, a record high.
