Elected less than two months ago to the presidency of Sri Lanka with an unfulfilled promise, Anura Kumara Dissanayake won a landslide victory in the legislative elections on Thursday, November 14. The former Marxist obtained 61.7% of the votes with his coalition of left-wing parties, the National People’s Power (PNP). It won 159 seats out of 225, a two-thirds majority, as well as twenty-one of the twenty-two electoral districts. The opposition was totally fragmented. Its main competitor, Samagi Jana Balawegaya. Sajith Premadasa’s party only received 17% of the votes.
The 55-year-old president will have free rein to carry out the major social, fiscal, political and institutional reforms that he promised to an exhausted population after five years of an abysmal crisis. “We believe that these elections will mark a turning point for the country”declared.
Anura Kumara Dissanayake, who had only three seats in the outgoing assembly, dissolved Parliament the day after taking office, on September 23. He opted for renewal, presenting new candidates. Most of his veteran opponents, including former presidents Ranil Wickremesinghe, Gotabaya Rajapaksa and Mahinda Rajapaksa, had given up running, as had nearly two-thirds of outgoing MPs.
Fight against corruption
The bet was not won in advance by Anura Kumara Dissanayake, elected head of the country with less than 50% of the votes cast. At the end of a brief campaign, he asked voters to give him a large parliamentary majority so he could“Establish a strong government that eliminates bribery and corruption. (…), change the system, clean up the House and ensure the law applies equally to everyone, including politicians.” Anura Kumara Dissanayake has championed the fight against corruption that has undermined the island of 22 million people for decades.
To modify the Constitution and return to the pre-1978 parliamentary system, the wish of his party and a large part of the population, the head of state needed a two-thirds majority in Parliament.
He made a spectacular advance in the North, in Jaffna, an ethnic enclave of the Hindu Tamil minority where a political party from the South had never won. In this ultra-militarized region, marked by thirty years of civil war between the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, the Sri Lankan army and the Sinhalese majority, Dissanayake promised to return the lands occupied by the armed forces and build a country where all citizens feel equal, regardless of their ethnic origin and religion. Delicate issues in this island state that has failed to promote reconciliation and remains deeply divided between its Sinhalese and Buddhist majority and its Hindu, Christian and Muslim minorities.
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