Do we like them?Do we like Mohamed Muizzu?
Our score: 3 out of 10. A real public-health win, but the press crackdown under his government and allegations he denies pull it down, and there's little on LGBTQ+ people or women either way.
Muizzu is an engineer first. He holds a civil engineering PhD from Leeds and ran housing and infrastructure from 2012 to 2018, a stint his supporters pitch as a record for roads, bridges and reclaimed land. He became the first directly elected mayor of Malé in 2021, then took the presidency on 17 November 2023. That builder's CV is the backbone of his pitch.
The mess of 2026 starts with an independent outlet, Adhadhu, which released a documentary called 'Aisha' on 28 March. It alleged sexual misconduct and abuse of power by the president. He has dismissed the allegations as “baseless lies”, and when a journalist raised them at an April press conference he had the man removed, telling him “You are making a blatant lie and a false accusation against me.”
What followed is what has press-freedom groups worried. Police raided Adhadhu's newsroom, a court issued a gag order on discussing the documentary, and prosecutors charged two of its senior staff with qazf, a false-accusation-of-adultery offence. Two journalists were then convicted and jailed for 10 and 15 days, one of them for asking about the allegations. The government spokesperson called claims of an attack on the press “unwarranted and politically motivated”. None of the reports I read show him personally ordering the charges.
On the harm check, I found no words from him against LGBTQ+ people or women, and no page I could open and date on how his government treats either group, so that's a gap rather than a clean bill. On the press, a media law passed in September 2025 gives the government broad powers, and Human Rights Watch's Elaine Pearson says the government should “urgently reverse the dangerous backsliding on media freedom”. His 2024 ban on Israeli passports over the Gaza war is contested: backers see solidarity with Palestinians, while Israel's foreign ministry urged its citizens to consider leaving.
He also pushes back on the label that defined his campaign. At the UN in 2024 he said “It's not India Out” and “We have never been against any one country at any point”. He framed his objection as being to foreign military presence on Maldivian soil.
April's local elections showed a split country. His party, the PNC, edged the overall seat count, 584 to 563 for the MDP, but won none of the five mayoralties and only five of 47 city council seats. Voters also rejected a referendum on merging presidential and parliamentary elections, with about 69 per cent against.