Ranil Wickremesinghe is the son of a wealthy family of entrepreneurs with political ties.
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According to results of the August 17 parliamentary polls, UNP was given 13 seats through the national list, and UPFA was given 12 seats. He later became Minister of Education and Minister of Industry. Yet over the years, he saw “a promising country go to waste” due to conflict between the Sinhalese and Tamils, according to his memoir. He was ousted in the 1994 parliamentary election by Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga’s People’s Alliance (PA).
In the coming days and weeks, the Rajapaksa supporters in the camp that he has headed in the elections, would be asking themselves if he would stick on, to lead them from the front – or, would retire quietly as he had said he would after the shocking presidential poll defeat.
Wickremesinghe appealed to all political parties to “work harmoniously at least for another two years [and] to come to a consensus on the basic issues affecting the country”.
The current Sri Lankan President Maithripala Sirisena began reforms in January after defeating former president Mahinda Rajapaksa.
But days before the elections, Sirisena purged Rajapaksa’s allies from the SLFP, consolidating his power in the party.
The agreement pledges constitutional reforms to ensure ethnic unity and uphold the rights of minorities.
Harsha De Silva, a specialist in development economics, holding a post-graduate degree and Ph.D. from the United States and 51-year-old Member of Parliament elected from Colombo on the UNP’s ticket, said the agreement was a fulfillment of people’s long-felt desire for cooperation between the two parties. He lost to his former health minister, Maithripala Sirisena, who vowed before Monday’s election not to appoint Rajapaksa as prime minister, even if the former president secured a majority in parliament. Unlike all those “smaller” Sinhala parties, whose need for Rajapaksa was more than the other way round, those “minority” parties with the UNP actually carried substantial vote shares with them.
The Memorandum of Understanding was signed between the United National Party and the Sri Lanka Freedom Party on a national government this morning at the Presidential Secretariat.
During the election, the Socialist Equality Party (SEP) was alone in warning that, while divided on foreign policy, the UNP and SLFP were united in their determination to impose the burden of the deepening economic crisis onto working people.
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Wickremesinghe has served twice before as prime minister, in 1993-94 and from 2001-04. Nevertheless, not everyone in his party may agree with this new vision and roadmap. Although Sirisena has not yet been able to fulfil much of his electoral promises, yet he has publicly committed himself to root out corruption, build up independent institutions and establish rule of law, diminish the military’s role, set in motion the process of reconciliation and justice and put a stop to ethnic and religious divisions.
