Victory for Capital – Danger for Democracy Part I: Sri Lanka's newly elected left-wing president backs down from his plans
Sri Lanka has voted. However, high debt service payments and strict IMF conditions severely restrict the political room for maneuver of the newly elected president – with serious social consequences and the risk of undermining public trust in democracy.
Blog by Malina Stutz (erlassjahr.de)
Elections after two years of transitional government
More than two years after the massive protests in spring 2022, Sri Lanka held its first elections since the unrest on September 21, 2024. Despite the flight of then-President Gotabaya Rajapaksa as a result of the protests, no new elections had been held until then. Instead, a transitional government under Ranil Wickremesinghe was formed in 2022, which many Sri Lankans considered to lack legitimacy. Wickremesinghe postponed local elections with flimsy pretexts and cracked down harshly on civil protests. The authoritarian transitional president also attempted to further delay the presidential elections. However, this was prevented by the intervention of the Sri Lankan Constitutional Court.
In the election at the end of September 2024, Wickremesinghe was unsurprisingly voted out of office. Left-wing candidate Anura Kumara Dissanayake won with over 40 percent of the first-preference votes. Dissanayake, chairman of the Marxist-Communist party Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP), ran as the lead candidate for an alliance of 20 other organizations, including political parties, youth and women's groups, and trade unions.
Read the full article in German (via erlassjahr.de)