According to police officials, at least 75,000 police officers and security forces have been deployed in all 14 districts of the island nation, just hours before voters will cast their votes on Monday, Xinhua reported.
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Based on his performance in the Presidential election, in which he had a slight edge over Sirisena among the majority Sinhalese community, Rajapaksa predicts that the UPFA will win the coming elections. Sirisena is now threatening to use his presidential powers just as autocratically as Rajapakse. Recalling that he asked Rajapakse several times not to stand, Sirisena writes: “If you did not contest this election, I would be able to take the initiative to win the confidence of most sections [of voters] … back to the SLFP”.
COLOMBO, Sri Lanka-Sri Lanka’s government has been reaching out to the country’s influential Tamil diaspora with the aim of building minority support and boosting its worldwide standing.
Maithripala Sirisena’s energies should have been directed to making structural changes within the SLFP to prevent a recurrence of everything he accuses Mahinda Rajapaksa of having done during his tenure.
The 63-year-old became an unlikely rallying point for disaffected Sri Lankans after walking out of Rajapakse’s government a day after sharing dinner with the former strongman president.
In the 5 page letter which President Sirisena would have burnt much mid night oil writing it and pouring his vitriol out, he has mentioned once in the dying embers of his political inferno, that he hopes the UPFA will win enough seats to form a government. Predictably, Rajapaksa announced he would run for parliament and seek the prime ministership.
“The office would likely go to a different figure while Rajapaksa would hold most of the power, setting up continual clashes with Sirisena”, said Sasha Riser-Kositsky, Asia Associate at Eurasia Group.
Rajapakse’s campaign speeches have been peppered with claims that Sirisena is “selling out” to Tamils and Muslims who together account for about a quarter of the population. Rajapaksa’s authoritarian impulses mirror those of Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who, after serving as Prime Minister for more than a decade, became his country’s first directly elected president past year.
The government Information Department in a release yesterday said that President Maithripala Sirisena has approved the donation as an urgent humanitarian aid to the people of Myanmar and the Foreign Ministry Secretary has been ordered to hand over the donation to the Myanmar Ambassador in Sri Lanka.
“I would have retired if they were doing a good job”, the 69-year-old said in one of his last addresses before Monday’s elections to the 225-seat national parliament.
The SLFP is a main constituent party in the UPFA coalition.
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Despite their leaders stance however, most of the UPFA top leaders, especially those who from small parties within the coalition, carried out election campaign with Rajapaksa as their de facto Prime Minister candidate. Rajapaksa and his brothers had been accused of corruption and crony capitalism and no one expected this scandal so soon after Sirisena took over and indirectly it did hit the image of the new government.
