Khaleel elected vice president of PPM

Dr. Abdulla Khaleel, the country’s foreign minister, has been elected as the vice president of the Progressive Party of Maldives (PPM) – a member of the ruling coalition.

PPM convened for an emergency senate meeting on Thursday.

The meeting came after a long period of inactivity amid rumors the party will soon be dissolved. But PPM officials denied that any discussions of the sort took place during the senate meeting.

A spokesperson from the PPM said on Thursday that the senate elected Khaleel as the party’s vice president and Ibrahim Abdul Razzaq Haleem, the CEO of Indhira Gandhi Memorial Hospital (IGMH) as the party’s secretary-general.

 The votes were unanimous.

PPM has two other vice presidents; Ahmed Shiyam, the country’s fisheries minister, and Mohamed Ghassan Maumoon, the country’s defense minister.

The PPM, registered in 2011, had once been the dominant out of the two parties in the ruling coalition. The People’s National Congress (PNC) was founded by former Maldivian president Abdulla Yameen Abdul Gayoom in 2019, amid a legal dispute over the ownership of PPM. Yameen would go on to win the case, after which PNC operated as PPM’s sister party. But after PPM’s presidential candidate, the then-jailed Yameen’s was disqualified from running in the 2023 elections. The then-opposition coalition decided to produce a candidate from PNC – President Dr. Mohamed Muizzu – who would go on to win the election.

Following his election win, President Muizzu was quickly elected as PNC’s president, and the party grew more prominent, outshining PPM. Meanwhile, Yameen, who had been the leader of PPM and headed the coalition, left the coalition to form a new party, the People’s National Front (PNF), after accusing the leadership of deliberately sidelining him.

Following its victory in the 2023 presidential elections, PNC went on to win this year’s parliamentary elections as well as the Male’ City by-elections, though it did concede the mayor seat to the main opposition Maldivian Democratic Party (MDP).

The PPM remains one of the country’s largest parties in terms of membership, second only to the MDP. PNC is ranked third.

The PNC initiated a membership drive earlier this year to boost its numbers to an ambitious 75,000. In August, the PNC said that many of its new members were from the PPM.