Sri Lanka’s New Marxist-Leaning President

Sri Lanka’s New Marxist-Leaning President

Elizabeth Denton

Staff Writer

Sri Lanka’s latest presidential election ended with Anura Kumara Dissanayake, a Marxist-leaning politician, winning the race. Since being elected Dissanayake has fulfilled his promise of dissolving Sri Lanka’s parliament. A few hours afterward, Dissanayake dissolved the 225-member parliament to make way for a snap general election, reports BBC News. The next election for parliament will take place on November 14. The last general election for parliament members occurred in August 2020 and with parliament members serving for five-year terms, this dissolution is bringing the next parliamentary election a year ahead of schedule.

The election is the first after Sri Lanka’s economic crisis in 2022 caused by the Sri Lankan government’s excessive borrowing on projects, economic mismanagement, deep tax cuts, and exacerbated by COVID-19 wiping out tourism revenue, Al Jazeera reports. The crisis led to antigovernment protests, with demonstrators taking over key buildings and forcing then-president Gotabaya Rajapaksa to flee the country and resign. Parliament elected Ranil Wickremesinghe to fill the remainder of Rajapaksa’s five-year term in July 2022.

According to NPR, Wickremesinghe managed to steer Sri Lanka out of the worst of the crisis and stabilize the situation, but many find it still far from ideal. Most Sri Lankans blame government leaders for the crisis and accuse the former president of corruption and mismanagement, which became the grounds for Dissanayake’s campaign.

During his campaign, Dissanayake pledged to fight corruption and bolster economic recovery, appealing to many of the working-class voters, says Reuters. He presented a $2.9 billion International Monetary Fund (IMF) bailout and promised to dissolve parliament within 45 days of taking office. He also guaranteed his commitment to ensuring full repayment of national debt.

During the election, around 75 percent of 17 million eligible voters cast their ballots. of  Dissanayake won 5.6 million votes. For the first time in Sri Lanka’s history, the presidential race was decided by a second round of vote counting. Dissanayake polled 42.3 percent of the counted votes while his opposition leader Sajith Premadasa polled 32.8 percent, with incumbent President Ranil Wickremesinghe knocked out of the running after the initial vote count, Reuters reports, making Dissanayake the new Sri Lankan president.

The Associated Press reports that after being elected president, Dissanayake swore in a female lawmaker as prime minister. Harini Amarasuriya is also a member of the Marxist-leaning National People’s Power coalition and is the country’s first woman to head the government in 24 years. The last woman to serve as prime minister was Sirimavo Bandaranaike, who was also the first female head of government when she started the post in 1960 and held it until 2000. Sri Lanka has only had one female president, Chandrika Kumaratunga, who held office from 1994 to 2005.

According to the Associated Press, Anura Kumara Dissanayake was born November 24, 1968, to a regular family in a paddy-growing central part of Sri Lanka. Growing up, Dissanayake took part in multiple student demonstrations against an agreement between Sri Lanka and India to grant self-rule to Sri Lanka’s Tamil minority. Once he entered university Dissanayake joined the Socialist Students’ Union, a student offset of the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP), also known as the People’s Liberation Front. In 1971 the JVP staged a failed armed insurrection and had since given up arms and politics. However, in 1987 the JVP staged a second armed insurrection to overthrow the government. In response the government killed the group’s leader, Rohana Wijeweera, and nearly all the JVP’s top members. Dissanayake went underground during this time.

Dissanayake entered public politics in 1993 with an attempt to rebuild the party under Somwansa Amarasinghe. The party won a seat in Parliament in 1994, marking its official entrance into democratic politics, The Associated Press states. In 1997, he became the national organizer of the Socialist Students’ Union and later that year, Dissanayake was added to the Central Committee of the JVP. One year later he joined the party’s politburo.

Dissanayake was elected to parliament in 2000 and served as agriculture and irrigation minister for a short period. Later, he and the JVP supported former President Mahinda Rajapaksa to militarily defeat rebels in 2009. After a radical left wing of the JVP broke off to form a new party in 2014, Dissanayake was elected leader of the JVP. In 2019 he formed the National People’s Power (NPP) and ran for president but lost to Gotabaya Rajapaksa.

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