COLOMBO, Sri Lanka (AP) — Sri Lanka’s election commission declared Marxist lawmaker Anura Kumara Dissanayake the winner of the country’s presidential election Sunday, after voters rejected the political old guard widely accused of driving the South Asian nation toward economic ruin.
Dissanayake, whose pro-working-class, anti-elite campaign made him popular with young people and brought him victory over Opposition Leader Sajith Premadasa The current liberal president, Ranil Wickremesinghe, took power in the country two years ago after its economy hit rock bottom.
Two years ago, tens of thousands of Sri Lankans rose up against their president, forcing him to flee the country. As the country prepares for its first election since then, many say they are still waiting for change. (AP Video/Rishi Lekhi, Rajesh Kumar Singh and Jay Baliban)
Election Commission data showed that Dissanayake got 5,740,179 votes, followed by Premadasa with 4,530,902 votes.
The elections held on Saturday were decisive as The country is seeking recovery. From the worst economic crisis in its history and The resulting political unrest.
“This achievement is not the work of one person, but the collective effort of hundreds of thousands of you,” Dissanayake said in a post on X. “Your commitment has brought us this far, and for that I am so grateful. This victory belongs to all of us.”
In a video statement, outgoing President Wickremesinghe congratulated Dissanayake and said he hoped he would successfully continue economic recovery efforts. The election was a virtual referendum on Wickremesinghe’s leadership, including restructuring Sri Lanka’s debt under an International Monetary Fund bailout after it defaulted in 2022.
Dissanayake, 55, has said he will renegotiate the IMF deal to make austerity measures more bearable. Wickremesinghe has warned that any move to change the fundamentals of the deal could delay the release of a fourth tranche of about $3 billion, which is crucial to maintaining stability.
Members of the special police stand guard outside a vote counting center in Colombo, Sri Lanka, Sunday, Sept. 22, 2024. (AP Photo/Eranga Jayawardane)
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“I have successfully fulfilled the responsibility that history has placed on me and have managed to save my country from bankruptcy within a short period of two years,” Wickremesinghe said.
Under Wickremesinghe, inflation has fallen, foreign reserves and the local currency have strengthened. The economy is expected to grow by 2% this year after contracting by 7% in 2022. But Sri Lankans still struggle with high taxes and the cost of living.
“We have suffered so much throughout our lives and now our children are also suffering. We need to put an end to this misery,” said Ranuka Priyanthi, 58, who voted for Dissanayake. She said she expected him to rebuild a country devastated by economic mismanagement and corruption.
Political analyst Jehan Perera said Dissanayake’s immediate challenge was to stabilize the economy “in the face of concerns among business and financial groups about his Marxist and revolutionary background.”
He said Dissanayake represented the spirit of the 2022 uprising in which angry Sri Lankans ousted then-President Gotabaya Rajapaksa and called for “regime change” and “new faces in politics.”
Sri Lankan President Ranil Wickremesinghe cast his vote in the country’s presidential election on Saturday, a vote that will determine the course of Sri Lanka’s recovery from its worst economic crisis and the political turmoil it has caused.
It was a strong performance for Dissanayake, who won more than 3% of the vote in the previous presidential election in 2019.
His coalition, the National People’s Power, is led by the Janata Vimukthi Peramuna, or People’s Liberation Front, a Marxist party that launched two failed armed uprisings in the 1970s and 1980s to seize power through socialist revolution. After its defeat, the People’s Liberation Front entered democratic politics in 1994 and played a major role in the opposition. However, it has supported several presidents and been part of governments for brief periods.
The NPP caucus also includes academics, civil society movements, artists, lawyers and students.
Dissanayake was first elected to Parliament in 2000 and briefly served as Minister of Agriculture and Irrigation under then President Chandrika Kumaratunga. He ran for president for the first time in 2019 and lost to Rajapaksa, who was ousted by the economic crisis two years later.
The government announced on Thursday that it had passed the final hurdle in Debt restructuring through agreement In principle, Sri Lanka has $83 billion in domestic and foreign debt. The government says it has restructured more than $17 billion.
The crisis was largely caused by excessive borrowing on projects that did not generate revenue. The impact of the Covid-19 pandemic and the government’s insistence on using scarce foreign reserves to support the currency, the rupee, also contributed to the free fall of the economy.
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