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Protests in Sri Lanka – Refugee President appoints Prime Minister as Acting President – News

13 July 2022

Sri Lankan President Gotabaya Rajapaksa has appointed Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe as acting president, according to a spokesman.
Rajapaksa had previously fled to the Maldives with his wife, according to various news agencies.
After massive protests, the President and Prime Minister had previously announced their resignation for Wednesday.

Rajapaksa was picked up at the airport in the Maldivian capital Male and taken to an unknown location by a police escort, a representative of the Sri Lankan government told the AFP news agency.

Meanwhile, Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe has declared a state of emergency in Sri Lanka. That’s what his office said. With the state of emergency, the country wants to do justice to the current situation. According to news agencies, protesters had previously stormed the prime minister’s office. The police responded with tear gas.

Legend:

De facto no longer in office: Gotabaya Rajapaksa

key stone

Massive protests

The 73-year-old president was recently the target of mass protests in his country, where demonstrators demanded his resignation and that of the prime minister. According to a BBC report, the news of Rajapaksa’s departure sparked spontaneous cheers among demonstrators in Sri Lanka’s capital Colombo.

The presidential palace was also stormed over the weekend.

political chaos

As a result of the worst economic crisis in decades, political chaos has also reigned in Sri Lanka. The months of mass protests had reached new dimensions at the weekend when tens of thousands of people demonstrated in Colombo against the state leadership.

A few hundred of them also managed to storm the Presidential Palace and Office and the Prime Minister’s official residence. Pictures of demonstrators in the pool of the luxurious presidential palace went around the world.

Selfies at the Presidential Pool. The pictures went around the world.

Immediate resignation demanded

Under pressure from the streets, Rajapaksa finally announced his resignation this Wednesday, but the demonstrators demanded his immediate resignation and wanted to continue their protests until then.

Prime Minister Wickremesinghe

In addition, together with the opposition, they also called for the resignation of Prime Minister Wickremesinghe and threatened nationwide strikes from Thursday if both had not resigned from their posts by then. Wickremesinghe had at least offered to withdraw at the weekend.

On July 20, Parliament is to elect one of its members to be the new President.

The island state south of India, with around 22 million inhabitants, is going through the worst economic crisis since independence from Great Britain in 1948. The anger of the demonstrators is fueled, among other things, by the lack of fuel and gas for cooking, which has existed for months, but also by the lack of medicine and food . High inflation and hour-long power outages also cause great resentment.

One reason for this is that income from important tourism has collapsed in the wake of the corona pandemic. The heavily indebted country lacks the money to import important goods. In view of the crisis, the government has asked the International Monetary Fund, India, China, Russia and other countries, among others, for help.

The UN Emergency Relief Office warned in June that the severe economic crisis could exacerbate a looming hunger crisis in Sri Lanka. The country had previously been on a good development path for ten years and had managed without UN humanitarian aid.