By Lucy Craymer and Kirsty Needham
WELLINGTON (Reuters) – Fiji’s Social Democratic Liberal Party (SODELPA) is due to meet on Friday to decide if its decision to form a coalition with the opposition stands, a move that comes after the Pacific country’s military was called in to help police maintain law and order.
Fiji is waiting for its president to recall parliament so lawmakers can vote for a new prime minister after a national election last week showed no party received a clear majority.
SODELPA, a power-broker holding three seats in the hung parliament, supports policies favouring indigenous Fijians, and on Tuesday signed a coalition agreement with the People’s Alliance and the National Federation Party.
However, the SODELPA’s board is to meet again on Friday, after the validity of the decision to back the coalition was challenged by the party’s general secretary and Fiji’s Supervisor of Elections.
Tensions have risen after last week’s election delivered a hung parliament. Prime Minister Frank Bainimarama’s Fiji First has not conceded defeat, while a coalition of three parties including SODELPA said it has a combined majority and had agreed on the leader of the People’s Alliance, Sitiveni Rabuka, as prime minister. Rabuka is also a former coup leader.
The Pacific island nation, which has a history of military coups, was dominated by sometimes tense race relations between its indigenous majority and a big ethnic Indian minority, before constitutional reform in 2013 to remove a race-based voting system that favoured indigenous Fijians.
However, opposition parties accuse Bainimarama and his allies of stoking fears of ethnic trouble as a pretext to cling to power.
Rabuka, in a post on Twitter, wrote that claims of Indo-Fijians being targeted were fabrications that were an attempt to “set the nation alight along racial lines.”
(Reporting by Lucy Craymer; Editing by Sandra Maler)
