Cash-strapped Sri Lanka was yesterday voting for its next president in an effective referendum on an unpopular IMF austerity plan enacted after the island nation’s unprecedented financial crisis.
Sri Lankan President Ranil Wickremesinghe is fighting an uphill battle for a fresh mandate to continue belt-tightening measures that stabilized the economy and ended months of food, fuel and medicine shortages.
His two years in office restored calm to the streets after civil unrest spurred by the downturn in 2022 led to thousands of people storming the compound of his predecessor, who promptly fled the country.
Photo: Reuters
“I’ve taken this country out of bankruptcy,” Wickremesinghe, 75, said after casting his ballot in the morning. “I will now deliver Sri Lanka a developed economy, developed social system and developed political system.”
However, Wickremesinghe’s tax hikes and other measures, imposed per the terms of a US$2.9 billion IMF bailout, have left millions struggling to make ends meet.
“The country has been through a lot,” lawyer and musician Soundarie David Rodrigo said after casting her vote in Colombo. “So I just don’t want to see another upheaval coming soon.”
Wickremesinghe is tipped to lose to one of two formidable challengers. One is Anura Kumara Dissanayaka, the leader of a once-marginal Marxist party tarnished by its violent past. The party led two failed uprisings in the 1970s and 1980s that left more than 80,000 people dead, and it won less than 4 percent of the vote in the last parliamentary elections.
However, Sri Lanka’s crisis has proven an opportunity for the 55-year-old Dissanayaka, who has seen a surge of support based on his pledge to change the nation’s “corrupt” political culture.
At a polling station he said he was confident of securing the top job.
“After the victory there should be no clashes, no violence,” he said. “Our country needs a new political culture.”
Fellow opposition leader Sajith Premadasa, 57, the son of a former president assassinated in 1993 during the country’s decades-long civil war, is also expected to make a strong showing.
He vowed to fight endemic corruption, and both he and Dissanayaka have pledged to renegotiate the terms of the IMF rescue package.
“There is a significant number of voters trying to send a strong message ... that they are very disappointed with the way this country has been governed,” said Murtaza Jafferjee, chairman of the think tank Advocata Institute.
A total of 39 people are contesting the vote, including one 79-year-old candidate who remains on the ballot despite dying of a heart attack last month.
More than 17 million people are eligible to vote in the election, with more than 63,000 police deployed to guard polling booths and counting centers in schools, temples.
“We also have anti-riot squads on standby in case of any trouble, but so far everything is peaceful,” police spokesman Nihal Talduwa said. “In some areas, we have had to deploy police to ensure polling booths are safe from wild animals, especially wild elephants.”
Chinese authorities said they began live-fire exercises in the Gulf of Tonkin on Monday, only days after Vietnam announced a new line marking what it considers its territory in the body of water between the nations. The Chinese Maritime Safety Administration said the exercises would be focused on the Beibu Gulf area, closer to the Chinese side of the Gulf of Tonkin, and would run until tomorrow evening. It gave no further details, but the drills follow an announcement last week by Vietnam establishing a baseline used to calculate the width of its territorial waters in the Gulf of Tonkin. State-run Vietnam News
‘UNUSUAL EVENT’: The Australian defense minister said that the Chinese navy task group was entitled to be where it was, but Australia would be watching it closely The Australian and New Zealand militaries were monitoring three Chinese warships moving unusually far south along Australia’s east coast on an unknown mission, officials said yesterday. The Australian government a week ago said that the warships had traveled through Southeast Asia and the Coral Sea, and were approaching northeast Australia. Australian Minister for Defence Richard Marles yesterday said that the Chinese ships — the Hengyang naval frigate, the Zunyi cruiser and the Weishanhu replenishment vessel — were “off the east coast of Australia.” Defense officials did not respond to a request for comment on a Financial Times report that the task group from
Four decades after they were forced apart, US-raised Adamary Garcia and her birth mother on Saturday fell into each other’s arms at the airport in Santiago, Chile. Without speaking, they embraced tearfully: A rare reunification for one the thousands of Chileans taken from their mothers as babies and given up for adoption abroad. “The worst is over,” Edita Bizama, 64, said as she beheld her daughter for the first time since her birth 41 years ago. Garcia had flown to Santiago with four other women born in Chile and adopted in the US. Reports have estimated there were 20,000 such cases from 1950 to
DEFENSE UPHEAVAL: Trump was also to remove the first woman to lead a military service, as well as the judge advocates general for the army, navy and air force US President Donald Trump on Friday fired the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Air Force General C.Q. Brown, and pushed out five other admirals and generals in an unprecedented shake-up of US military leadership. Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social that he would nominate former lieutenant general Dan “Razin” Caine to succeed Brown, breaking with tradition by pulling someone out of retirement for the first time to become the top military officer. The president would also replace the head of the US Navy, a position held by Admiral Lisa Franchetti, the first woman to lead a military service,
RSS