Sri Lanka Elects Leftist Leader Dissanayake as President - The New York Times

Sri Lanka Elects Leftist Leader Dissanayake as President - The New York Times




Leftist Leader Elected President as Sri Lanka Rejects the Old Order

Anura Kumara Dissanayake’s strong showing reveals voter weariness with leadership that has led to a national economic crisis and crushing hardship for many people.

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Anura Kumara Dissanayake, center, leaving a polling station after casting his vote in the presidential election in Colombo, Sri Lanka, on Saturday.Credit...Chamila Karunarathne/EPA, via Shutterstock


By Mujib Mashal and Pamodi Waravita


Reporting from Colombo, Sri Lanka
Sept. 21, 2024



The Marxist candidate, Anura Kumara Dissanayake, was elected president of Sri Lanka on Sunday, riding a wave of popular anger at the established political order that ran the South Asian nation’s economy into the ground.

The remarkable turnaround for Mr. Dissanayake, after he had won only 3 percent of the vote in 2019, lifts his half-century-old leftist party, Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna, to the center of a political landscape shattered by widespread protests two years ago. The popular outpouring of anger culminated in the toppling of the strongman president, Gotabaya Rajapaksa, who fled the capital city, Colombo, on a navy ship as protesters jumped into his pool and fried snacks in his kitchen.

Mr. Dissanayake, 55, had in recent years led a rebranding effort of an organization once known for deadly insurrections: building a large coalition, softening its radical positions and pitching it as the alternative to the deeply rooted politics of patronage that has brought only hardship to many of the island nation’s roughly 23 million people.

“The people have placed their trust in me and my political movement,” Mr. Dissanayake said on Sunday evening after the election commission officially declared him the winner. “Everyone — those who voted and didn’t vote for me — we have a responsibility to take this country forward.”


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Mr. Dissanayake secured 42 percent of Saturday’s high-turnout vote, about 80 percent. His closest competitor, the opposition leader Sajith Premadasa, received about 33 percent of the votes cast.

In a sign of how enormous a swing it is in the island nation’s political landscape, Mr. Dissanayake’s immediate challenge will be forming his cabinet. In Sri Lanka’s system, cabinet ministers must come from the Parliament, where his party has only three seats.

His officials said the new president has constitutional options to oversee the work of the ministries while he calls for new parliamentary elections in the coming months, in which his party will have the momentum.

“Parliament will be dissolved because this Parliament already lost the mandate,” said Bimal Rathnayake, a member the political bureau of the new ruling party.

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Election officials carrying ballot boxes to a counting center on Saturday in Jaffna, Sri Lanka.Credit...Navesh Chitrakar/Reuters


While congratulations and concessions trickled in early Sunday morning as the overnight vote count continued, Mr. Dissanayake’s official victory had to wait until late in the day as the results required another round of counting that included voters’ second and third choices.



In Sri Lanka’s ranked-choice election system, voters can mark one candidate on their ballot or list three candidates in order of preference. If no candidate gets 50 percent or more of the vote, a second round of counting factors in the preferences of voters whose first choice did not make it to the top two.

At the end of a peaceful and orderly vote on Saturday, the government had made a surprise announcement of an overnight curfew as the counting continued. But a statement of support from Mr. Dissanayake’s camp suggested it was a coordinated effort to prevent violence, rather than anything sinister.

There was also praise from leaders of the country’s minority groups, as well as from activists for an election campaign that, unlike divisive past campaigns, had happened largely “without recourse to racial or religious chauvinism.”

It is the first time a presidential election in Sri Lanka has appeared genuinely multipronged, in contrast to a history of direct competition between coalitions formed by the two parties that have dominated ever since the nation became a republic in 1972.


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While officially more than 30 candidates were contesting, the majority of the votes were split among three front-runners.

The popular protest movement that forced the powerful Rajapaksa clan out of power in 2022 threw the political landscape wide open, the anger reshaping the dynamics down to the local level. While Gotabaya Rajapaksa had put accusations of war crimes during the country’s bloody civil war behind him to win a handsome mandate in 2019, his management of the economy led to his downfall: The country ran out of foreign exchange for imports, as people lined up for fuel and food.

Before its fall, the Rajapaksa government had become a family affair, with various relatives serving as president and prime minister, as well as helming several ministries and key positions. But its fall has been so thorough that Namal Rajapaksa, the family’s 38-year-old political heir and presidential candidate in the current election, was a distant fourth, with a single-digit share of the votes.

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As interim president, Ranil Wickremesinghe helped stabilize the country after widespread protests ousted the previous president in 2022. Credit...Dinuka Liyanawatte/Reuters


Ranil Wickremesinghe, the 75-year-old political survivor who stepped in as interim president after Mr. Rajapaksa fled the country when protesters surrounded his home, has helped stabilize the country and negotiated a bailout package with the International Monetary Fund.



But Mr. Wickremesinghe was also trailing far behind in Saturday’s vote, with his roughly 17 percent of the votes putting him in third place — a sign of anger over his austerity measures that have pinched the poor hard, and of his lasting public image as part of the discredited old guard.

Mr. Premadasa, the opposition leader, had also tried to fashion himself as offering an alternative with more capable hands in his team to handle the economy. But he was formerly in Mr. Wickremesinghe’s party before a messy public parting also split the party support base.

Mr. Dissanayake positioned his National People’s Power coalition, built around his old J.V.P. party as its largest partner, as the best positioned to deliver the public demands of the protest movement for cleaning up Sri Lanka’s deeply entrenched political patronage and corruption. He brought in new faces at the top, and focused on reaching out to and mobilizing women, who were particularly hard hit by the economic collapse. He also softened his own party’s old radical Marxist messaging.

His efforts appeared to have resonated with a tired public ready for change.

“I’m voting for the Compass this time,” said Saman Ratnasiri, 49, an auto-rickshaw driver in Colombo, referring to the election symbol of Mr. Dissanayake’s coalition. He said he had never voted for Mr. Dissanayake before, but he wanted to give his outfit a shot after other leaders had failed him.

“If we don’t get it right this time also, then I might as well forget about this country,” he added.


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The government made a surprise announcement of an overnight curfew as vote counting continued late into Saturday.Credit...Ishara S. Kodikara/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images


The economy was a central issue of the campaign, with poorer people continuing to feel the pinch of the austerity measures as the interim government increased taxes and reduced subsidies. The economic collapse saw poverty rates double, with a quarter of the population living below the poverty line.

All of the main candidates were largely in favor of the economic stabilization efforts around the I.M.F. bailout package and the macrovision of increasing taxes and increasing exports to correct a lopsided economy, said Umesh Moramudali, a Colombo-based economist.

Mr. Dissanayake has said that he would like to revisit the debt sustainability with the I.M.F. in the hopes of getting more relief for the poor and middle class. Mr. Moramudali said the new president might find some face-saving ways in which he manages certain small concessions for his political base without throwing the program into uncertainty that derails the recovery.

“All three of them categorically mentioned that they will not derail from the I.M.F. program,” Mr. Moramudali said. “I think that stems from the fact that they understand the potential downsides of leaving an I.M.F. program in a situation like this.”


Mujib Mashal is the South Asia bureau chief for The Times, helping to lead coverage of India and the diverse region around it, including Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal and Bhutan. More about Mujib Mashal
A version of this article appears in print on Sep

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