COLOMBO — Sri Lanka’s National People’s Power (NPP) party, led by President Anura Kumara Dissanayake, won Thursday’s parliamentary election in a landslide, paving the way for the new president to push his policies.
The NPP secured 159 seats in the 225-member legislature, or 70% of the total, according to the final result released Friday by the Election Commission of Sri Lanka, marking a seismic shift in voter sentiment for a party that held only three seats in the parliament before the election. Out of 225 seats, 196 are contested across the nation’s 22 districts under a proportional representation system, which allocates seats to parties based on the number of votes obtained in each district. The remaining 29 are distributed to parties based on the nationwide vote count.
Some commentators on Sri Lankan national TV described the outcome as a “political tsunami” during overnight broadcasts. The results exceeded even the optimistic expectations of the NPP’s leaders as they aimed to cross the 113-seat threshold to secure a simple majority to govern without a coalition.
Dissanayake and his party not only broke a coalition bloc that has controlled the Sri Lankan parliament since the mid-1990s but have made history: This is the first time a single party has won a two-thirds majority under Sri Lanka’s proportional representation system.
“The corrupt needed to be voted out, because we need a new crop of [members of parliament],” Prime Minister Harini Amarasuriya told Nikkei Asia shortly after voting on Thursday morning. “The people who destroyed the country need to be defeated to build a new country.”
Her sentiments, which were widely shared during the NPP’s election campaign, were echoed by voters. “We chose the NPP because of the campaign to improve the economy and fight corruption,” said Kosala Karunaratne, an executive in a company based in the free trade zone close to the international airport north of Colombo. “Many people switched to them after having voted for other parties before.”
Analysts are not surprised by the economic discontent that shaped the electoral verdict. Dissanayake himself, during his successful campaign, tapped into the nationwide pain felt by millions of families following Sri Lanka’s economic meltdown in 2022. “The failure of the economy kicked everything into gear, but it was not the only [issue] that drove voters to clamor for a new political leadership and culture,” said Farzana Haniffa, professor in the department of sociology at the University of Colombo. “People are really pushing back against politics as usual and have found the space to challenge the old establishment.”
That proved true in the northern regions, traditionally the stronghold of Tamil political parties who staked their campaigns on the ethnic rights of the largest minority in predominantly Sinhala-Buddhist Sri Lanka. The NPP won the Jaffna district, the Tamil nationalist heartland, a landmark for a mainstream party from the country’s south.
“Public anger towards the Tamil nationalist parties was evident because of their failure to respond to the people’s economic hardship after the 2022 crisis,” said Ahilan Kadirgamar, a political economist at the University of Jaffna. “The NPP was the only party that provided them with an outlet to register their anger.”
Trailing a poor second in the election was the Samagi Jana Balawegaya party, which had been the opposition in the previous parliament. It bagged 40 seats, echoing the loss of political fortunes the party already suffered at September’s presidential elections, when its leader Sajith Premadasa, a seasoned politician and former cabinet minister, came second to Dissanayake. In the 2020 general elections, the SJB had won 54 seats.
The voters’ harshest judgment against a political establishment was leveled at the Sri Lanka Podujana Peramuna party, the standard bearer of the ultra-nationalist and hawkish Rajapaksa family, which had produced two former presidents, Mahinda and Gotabaya, and a string of cabinet ministers in their more than two decades of dominance. Rajapaksa dynasties were blamed for the island nation’s economic meltdown in 2022. The party scraped through with a mere two seats, a humiliation from the 145 seats it won in 2020.
“SLPP MPs paid a heavy price for the corruption during their government,” said Paikiasothy Saravanamuttu, executive director of the Centre for Policy Alternatives, a Colombo-based think tank. “It also did not have Mahinda to lead the campaign for a party that revolves around the Rajapaksas.”
The polls echoed similar wrath against former President Ranil Wickremesinghe, who stepped in as the interim leader after a parliamentary vote in 2022 to help rebuild the bankrupt economy following Gotabaya Rajapaksa’s resignation. The alliance he was part of, the New Democratic Front, won only five seats. It came on the heels of the veteran politician and six-time prime minister, Wickremesinghe, already tasting defeat by a distant third at the presidential polls.
Until the end of the election campaign, he had goaded the NPP and its interim government of three, including Dissanayake and Prime Minister Amarasuriya, of being neophytes when it comes to pushing punishing economic reforms that are part of an International Monetary Fund bailout of the country. But Amarasuriya brushed that barb aside, saying that the NPP’s new government intends to “build the economy with social protections and deliver the other pledges in its manifesto.”
source : asia.nikkei