A leftist politician has won Sri Lanka’s presidential election: the first to be held since unrest caused the country’s government to be deposed in 2022.
Anuru Kumara Dissanayake was declared the winner over the weekend. For presidential elections, Sri Lanka uses a ranked-choice voting system, where voters indicate their choice for first, second, and third among the candidates.
Dissanayake won 42% of first-preference voters, but when the second and third preferences were announced, he managed 55%.
In 2019 he had run for President, but won only 3% of the vote. This now indicates that Sri Lankans are fed up with the status quo.
Dissanayake, a former MP, ran on a platform promising good governance and a harsh stance on corruption. He also said he would continue the deal the country had struck with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to bail it out of an economic crisis while mitigating the affects austerity had on the country’s poorest.
Sri Lanka was plunged into an economic crisis at the beginning of the decade, after a combination of excessive borrowing and the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic saw the economy go into free fall. The country had to approach the IMF for assistance. The economy has stabilised in the past two years, but it is clear that Sri Lankans are now hungry for change.
Following his victory, Dissanayake said on social media: “This achievement is not the result of any single person’s work, but the collective effort of hundreds of thousands of you. Your commitment has brought us this far, and for that, I am deeply grateful. This victory belongs to all of us.”
Image by Vector Gallery from Pixabay