MPSC 2025 Prelims Paper-I · Question 93 of 100

Correct — option (1), People's National Congress. The Maldives held elections to its parliament, the People's Majlis, on 21 April 2024. The People's National Congress (PNC), the party of President Mohamed Muizzu, won a decisive majority in its own right — 66 of the chamber's 93 seats — and with allied parties and independents who joined it took its strength to over 70 seats, a result commentators described as an obliteration of the opposition. The vote followed Muizzu's own election as President in 2023 on a platform widely read as tilting the Maldives away from India and toward China, and the parliamentary result gave his government the legislative majority to pursue that agenda without the cohabitation difficulties a divided parliament would have created.

• (2)Maldives National Congress — No party of this name contested or won the Maldives' 2024 parliamentary election. It functions as a decoy built from a plausible-sounding recombination of the winning party's own name, 'People's National Congress', with the country's name substituted for 'People's'.
• (3)Awami League — The Awami League is Bangladesh's party, long led by Sheikh Hasina, not a Maldivian party at all. It is a plausible-sounding South Asian party name that has no role in Maldivian politics, and its inclusion here tests whether a candidate can keep the region's various national parties correctly attached to their own countries.
• (4)Democratic Party — The Maldives Democratic Party (MDP) is a real and historically significant Maldivian party — it is the party of former President Mohamed Nasheed and had been the dominant force in the outgoing parliament — but it suffered a heavy defeat in the April 2024 election, winning only around 12 seats against the PNC's landslide. 'Democratic Party' here trades on a real, recently prominent name rather than describing the election's actual winner.

The Maldives is a parliamentary republic whose legislature, the People's Majlis, is elected directly and separately from the presidency. President Mohamed Muizzu, who won the presidency in 2023 on a platform generally read as favouring closer ties with China over India, needed his own party to control the Majlis to govern without obstruction from a legislature still dominated by his predecessor's allies. The parliamentary election of 21 April 2024 delivered exactly that: the People's National Congress won a commanding majority, giving Muizzu's government a free hand to pursue its legislative agenda.

MPSC and UPSC both track Maldivian politics closely because of its direct bearing on India's neighbourhood and 'Neighbourhood First' foreign policy — the Maldives sits astride key Indian Ocean sea lanes and has, in recent years, become a visible arena of India-China strategic competition. A change of ruling party in Malé, and the scale of its parliamentary mandate, is treated as significant current affairs precisely because it signals how much room the elected government will have to shift the country's external alignment.

• Parliamentary elections to the Maldives' People's Majlis were held on 21 April 2024.
• The People's National Congress (PNC), led by President Mohamed Muizzu, won 66 of the 93 seats outright, and over 70 with allies and independents who subsequently joined it.
• The Maldivian Democratic Party (MDP), the previously dominant party associated with former President Mohamed Nasheed, was heavily defeated, winning only around 12 seats.
• Voter turnout in the election was approximately 76 percent.
• The result followed Mohamed Muizzu's own election as President in 2023, on a platform widely read as favouring closer ties with China.

• Confusing the Maldives' People's National Congress with similarly named but unrelated parties from other South Asian countries, such as Bangladesh's Awami League
• Assuming the Maldives Democratic Party, the country's most historically prominent party, must still be the ruling party without checking the outcome of the specific 2024 election being asked about
• Treating a fabricated party name that merely recombines familiar words — 'Maldives' plus 'National Congress' — as a real option rather than recognising it as a decoy

MPSC and UPSC both test recent neighbourhood elections as current affairs, and the wrong options in this family are typically built either from a genuine but defeated party in the same country, or from a real party name transplanted from a different South Asian country entirely. The defence is to hold, for each neighbouring country, its current ruling party and head of government as a single up-to-date fact, rather than a static memory from an earlier election cycle.

No directly related past PYQ was found.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Who is the President of the Maldives whose party, the People's National Congress, won the parliamentary election of April 2024 ?

  • (a)Mohamed Nasheed
  • (b)Ibrahim Mohamed Solih
  • (c)Mohamed Muizzu
  • (d)Abdulla Yameen

  Answer(c) Mohamed Muizzu — elected President of the Maldives in 2023, whose party, the People's National Congress, then won a commanding majority in the April 2024 parliamentary election. Nasheed and Solih are past presidents from the Maldivian Democratic Party, and Yameen is a former president from an earlier period.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The Maldivian Democratic Party (MDP), the previously dominant party in the People's Majlis, was associated with which former President of the Maldives ?

  • (a)Mohamed Muizzu
  • (b)Mohamed Nasheed
  • (c)Abdulla Yameen
  • (d)Maumoon Abdul Gayoom

  Answer(b) Mohamed Nasheed — the Maldivian Democratic Party is most closely associated with him; it suffered a heavy defeat in the April 2024 parliamentary election, winning only around 12 of 93 seats against the ruling People's National Congress's landslide.