It was a long day on Sunday, September 22, in Sri Lanka. It took hours of counting to know the name of the winner of the presidential election. The results came in early in the evening, while a curfew had been imposed by the outgoing president, Ranil Wickremesinghe. Anura Kumara Dissanayake, 55, becomes the ninth president of the Indian Ocean island and the first president of Marxist obedience. Sri Lankans mobilized massively, opting for a break. The turnout was 77%.
The announcement of the results required a complex procedure. Mr Dinassayake came in first with 42.3% of the vote, but fell short of the 50% and one vote mark. The electoral commission had to count “preferential votes” for the first time in the country’s history. Sri Lankan voters can choose one candidate or rank three top candidates in order of preference.
At the end of this count, the winner is well ahead of his competitors: the centre-right candidate, Sajith Premadasa, obtains 32.7% of the votes and the outgoing president, very unpopular, only receives 17.2% of the votes. “This victory is everyone’s, said the elected official in a message on X. Together, we are ready to rewrite the history of Sri Lanka.”
No experience of power
The man who has reached the highest responsibilities, the son of farmers, a science graduate, a simple MP, has no experience of power, and his party has only three seats in Parliament. But, in the eyes of Sri Lankans, exasperated by the stranglehold of a few nepotistic families who have succeeded one another in power for eight decades, he embodies renewal.
At the head of the National People’s Power, a coalition of left-wing parties, trade unions, members of civil society, women’s groups, students, formed in 2019, “AKD”, as his supporters call him, has been able to capitalize on the anger of Sri Lankans, hit for five years by a historic economic and financial crisis. This admirer of Che Guevara and Fidel Castro has managed to make people forget the violent past of his political party, the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna, associated with two armed insurrections against the state in the 1970s and 1980s, which left thousands dead.
His victory tastes like revenge for the men and women who participated in the great citizens’ revolution of 2022, demanding the departure of the head of state at the time, Gotabaya Rajapaksa, in office since 2019 and held responsible for the country’s failure. At the end of these mobilizations, many participants felt betrayed. They had certainly won their case, Gotabaya had fled the country, but no real political change had followed. Parliament had appointed Ranil Wickremesinghe to succeed him, close to the Rajapaksas, who strove to protect this family. All the demands of the “Aragalaya”, the name given to the citizens’ movement, were ignored, whether it was the abolition of the executive presidency, which gives exorbitant powers to the head of state, the fight against corruption or the quest for justice.
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