Comment: From confrontation to conciliation and coalition?

If still some political leaders will still not talk about conciliation and nor talk to one another, and instead hold grudges against one another, it has have more to do with personal hurt and/or ego than politics and political philosophies.

Independent of the political implications involved, Parliament Speaker Abdulla Shahid’s decision to join the opposition Maldivian Democratic Party (MDP), after quitting the Dhivehi Rayithunge Party (DRP), is a case in point. At the height of the ‘power-transfer’ in February last year, the MDP charged him and the Majlis with impropriety in hurrying through the ‘succession processes’ after President Mohammed Nasheed gave way to Vice-President Mohammed Waheed Hassan Manik in a surprising yet not wholly unexpected turn of events. Earlier, too, Speaker Shahid was locked in a series of procedural issues between the Executive under President Nasheed and the Majlis, where as the ‘minority party’ the MDP saw him more as an ‘opposition man’ than as an unbiased Speaker of the House.

A fortnight after Speaker Shahid’s formal announcement, no major party in the ruling coalition has demanded his resignation. Nor has any of them talked about moving a no-trust vote against him. Individual voices have been raised, but they have remained as such.