Six-time Prime Minister and Acting President Ranil Wickremesinghe was on Wednesday elected President of Sri Lanka — a post he has coveted but never held in his nearly half-century-long political career — amid an extraordinary political crisis set off by the island nation’s painful economic crash.
Mr. Wickremesinghe won 134 votes in the 225-member Parliament, securing a comfortable victory margin in a three-way contest. Dullas Alahapperuma, a formerly Rajapaksa-aligned, now independent MP, won 82 votes, despite several Independent lawmakers, the main Opposition, and most minority parties, pledging support to him on Tuesday, a day before voting in a secret ballot. The leftist Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna’s candidate Anura Kumara Dissanayake won three votes. Two MPs from the Tamil National People’s Front (TNPF) abstained.
“The time for division is over,” Mr. Wickremesinghe said in his first remarks after clinching Presidency. He urged all political parties to come together to take the country on the path of economic recovery.
This is the third unlikely elevation this year for Mr. Wickremesinghe, 73, who is the United National Party’s sole MP — entering not with an election win, but through the national list, based on the party’s vote share in the 2020 general elections.
In the past three months he has risen from lone MP to PM, before clinching Presidency on Wednesday.
Meanwhile, protesters from the ‘Janatha Aragalaya’ (‘People’s Struggle’) have said they would agitate until Mr. Wickremesinghe, too, steps down.
“After ‘Gota go home’, demand number two of the people’s protests was clearly ‘Ranil go home’. He has no political mandate. He doesn’t have the people’s mandate,” Marisa De Silva, human rights activist who is part of the people’s movement, told The Hindu .
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