Sri Lankan president’s leftist coalition secures landslide election win

COLOMBO: The coalition of Sri Lanka’s new President Anura Kumara Dissanayake won a landslide victory in a snap parliamentary vote, results from the election body showed on Friday, giving the left-leaning leader a mandate to fight poverty and corruption in the crisis-hit island nation.

Dissanayake’s alliance, the National People’s Power, secured 159 seats in the 225-member assembly, according to the results released by the Election Commission.

The United People’s Power of Sajith Premadasa retained its role from the previous parliament as the largest opposition party, winning 40 seats.

When Dissanayake won the presidential vote in September, he had only three members of his party in parliament, which limited his ability to realize his campaign promises.

To boost the NPP’s representation — as government ministers can be appointed only from among lawmakers — he dissolved the parliament and cleared the way for the polls that took place on Thursday, a year ahead of schedule.

While ahead of the poll, the president expressed optimism that the 42 percent of the vote he received in the presidential election showed the NPP was “a winning party,” the landslide win came with a surprise.

“It’s a historic election,” Lakshman Gunasekara, a political analyst in Colombo, told Arab News. “The result has gone far beyond the expectations of analysts ... I did not expect them to win a total majority, but they have done so.”

Dissanayake and his coalition took over control of Sri Lanka as the nation continued to reel from the 2022 economic crisis — its worst since independence in 1948. The austerity measures imposed by his predecessor, Ranil Wickremesinghe — part of a bailout deal with the International Monetary Fund — led to price hikes in food and fuel and caused hardship to millions of Sri Lankans.

Dissanayake said during his campaign that he planned to renegotiate the targets set in the IMF deal, as it placed too much burden on the ordinary people.

More than half of former lawmakers chose not to run for re-election. No contenders were seen from the powerful Rajapaksa family, including former president Mahinda Rajapaksa and his brother, also former president, Gotabaya — who was ousted in 2022 and largely blamed for the crisis.

Sri Lanka People’s Front, the party loyal to the Rajapaksa family, secured only three seats in the new parliament.

Sri Lankans decided to choose the NPP, a movement that until now would never win more than 4 percent, as there was a general “anti-incumbency kind of mood, but also tiredness among the voters of the same old parties alternating and doing political mismanagement, whipping up ethnic chauvinism, encouraging attacks on minorities to cover up for their own corruption,” Gunasekara said.

He explained that even more voted for the NPP than for Dissanayake in the presidential vote, as during slightly over one month of his and his three-member cabinet’s rule, they “realized that this new leadership is very fresh in their style of governance, very collective ... not personality-oriented, and also did not resort to violence or bullying or thuggery.”

Both Dissanayake and most of his party members come from the poorest segments of Sri Lankan society.

“He’s a son of a farmer, benefited from free education ... He’s an educated person, but coming from the lowest classes, not from the urban elite, not the urban middle class, the Westernized people, fashionable people, not at all,” Gunasekara said.

“It will be a new entrant into the South Asian political arena ... For the first time, we have subalterns who have arrived in power. And they have arrived with a huge majority.”