Virendra Pandit
New Delhi: Sri Lanka’s new Marxist President Anura Kumara Dissanayake’s leftist coalition won a landslide victory in snap legislative elections, results showed on Friday, as the traditional Opposition seemed ‘dead’ and voters repudiated unpopular establishment parties they blamed for triggering an economic crisis since 2022.
Dissanayake, a self-avowed Marxist, swept the September presidential elections on a promise to combat graft and recover stolen assets, two years after a slow-motion, post-COVID-19 financial crash imposed widespread hardships on the island nation next door to India.
Anura’s decision to immediately call polls and secure parliamentary backing for his agenda was vindicated on Friday, with his National People’s Power (NPP) coalition taking at least 123 seats in the 225-member assembly and was on track to win many more, the media reported.
The leftist coalition won a massive 62 percent of the vote among the more than three-quarters of ballots counted so far, while opposition leader Sajith Premadasa’s party was far behind with only 18 percent.
Dissanayake’s party, Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP), won the most votes even in the northern district of Jaffna, dominated by the island’s minority Tamil community, for the first time since independence from Britain in 1948.
Anura, the 55-year-old son of a laborer, said he expected “a strong majority” in parliament to press ahead with his plans. “This is a crucial election that will mark a turning point in Sri Lanka,” he said, adding “The NPP expects a mandate for a very strong majority in parliament.”
Voter turnout was estimated at around 70 percent, vis-a-vis in September presidential poll’s 80 percent.
Dissanayake has remained a Member of Parliament (MP) for nearly 25 years and was briefly an agriculture minister also, but his NPP coalition held just three seats in the outgoing assembly.
However, he stormed to the presidency after successfully distancing himself from establishment politicians blamed for steering the country to its 2022 economic meltdown.
The financial crash was the worst in Buddhist-majority Sri Lanka’s history as an independent nation since 1948, sparking months-long shortages of food, fuel, and essential medicines. The resulting public anger culminated in a political crisis, leading to the storming of then-president Gotabaya Rajapaksa’s palatial compound, prompting his resignation and temporary exile.
Dissanayake’s pledge to change a “corrupt” political culture has resonated with millions of Sri Lankans struggling to make ends meet following tax hikes and other austerity measures imposed to repair the nation’s finances.
His party, the main constituent in the NPP coalition, led two insurrections in 1971 and 1987 that resulted in at least 80,000 deaths.
But he was sworn in after September’s presidential polls, described as one of the island nation’s most peaceful elections.
Portraits of communist luminaries including Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin, Friedrich Engels, and Fidel Castro hang in Dissanayake’s office in the capital.
Since his rise to popularity, however, he has softened some policies, saying he believes in an open economy and is not totally opposed to privatization.
Dissanayake had campaigned on a pledge to renegotiate a controversial USD 2.9 billion International Monetary Fund (IMF) bailout secured by his predecessor, Ranil Wickremesinghe.
But since taking office, he has resolved to maintain the existing agreement with the international lender.
The island country’s main private sector lobby, the Ceylon Chamber of Commerce, is tacitly supporting Dissanayake and his program. Sri Lanka’s stock exchange gained over 16 percent in the eight weeks since Dissanayake won the presidency.
Poll monitors and analysts said Thursday’s election had failed to generate the level of enthusiasm — or violence — seen at previous polls.
“The opposition is dead,” political analyst Kusal Perera said before the vote. “The result of the election was a foregone conclusion.”