It was a long day, Sunday 22 September, in Sri Lanka. It took hours of counting to determine the winner of the presidential election. The results were announced in the early afternoon, when the outgoing president, Ranil Wickremesinghe, had imposed a curfew. Anura Kumara Dissanayake, 55, became the ninth president of the Indian Ocean island and the first Marxist president. The Sri Lankans, who mobilised en masse (the turnout was 77%), opted for a break.
The announcement of the results required a complex procedure. Dinassayake came first with 42.3% of the votes, but did not cross the 50% mark and one vote. The electoral commission had to, for the first time in the country’s history, count “preferential votes”. Sri Lankan voters can choose one contender or rank the top three candidates in order of preference.
At the end of this count, the winner is far ahead of his competitors: the centre-right candidate, Sajith Premadasa, obtains 32.7% of the votes and the very unpopular outgoing president only obtains 17.2% of the votes. “This victory belongs to everyone, the elected official said in a message on X. Together we are ready to rewrite the history of Sri Lanka. »
Without experience of power
The man who has risen to the top of the list of responsibilities, a son of farmers, a graduate in science, a simple MP, has no experience in power, and his party has only three seats in Parliament. But in the eyes of Sri Lankans, exasperated by the control of a few nepotistic families who have succeeded one another in power for eight decades, he embodies renewal.
At the head of the National People’s Power, a coalition of left-wing parties, trade unions, civil society members, women’s groups and students formed in 2019, the “AKD”, as it is called by its supporters, has been able to capitalise on the anger of Sri Lankans, who have been hit by a historic economic and financial crisis for five years. This admirer of Che Guevara and Fidel Castro has managed to forget the violent past of his political group, the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna, associated with two armed insurrections against the state in the 1970s and 1980s, which left thousands dead.
His victory has a taste of revenge for the men and women who participated in the great citizens’ revolution of 2022, demanding the departure of the then head of state, Gotabaya Rajapaksa, in office since 2019 and held responsible for the bankruptcy of the country. At the end of these mobilizations, many participants had the feeling of having been betrayed. They certainly won the case, Gotabaya fled the country, but no real political change took place. Parliament had appointed Ranil Wickremesinghe to succeed him, close to the Rajapaksas, who were trying to protect this family. All the demands of “Aragalaya”, the name given to the citizens’ movement, have been ignored, whether it be the abolition of the executive presidency, which confers exorbitant powers on the head of state, or the fight against corruption or the search for justice.
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