Holding the local council elections as soon as possible was of the utmost importance, said the Speaker of the Majlis, ex-President Mohamed Nasheed.
The de-facto leader of the ruling Maldivian Democratic Party, Nasheed said this with regards to comments made by the President of the Elections Commission, Ahmed Shareef, about the virtual impossibility of elections on March 6, as had been previously scheduled.
According to Shareef, lifting the state of public health emergency was necessary for the elections to be held.
In his tweet, President Nasheed said that holding elections "as soon as possible" was of "utmost importance". If laws had to be changed to achieve this, he wrote that he believed that it was also important that those changes had to be made.
The government has recently decided to extend the state of public health emergency until February 3. Even prior to these comments, the Elections Commission has said that elections on March 6 would be "difficult" unless the state of emergency was lifted before the end of January.
The local council elections had originally been scheduled for April 2020. Given the outbreak of COVID-19 in the Maldives, the elections had to be delayed to March 6 through an amendment to the Constitution and a Sunset law later ratified by the President.