Sirisena defected from Rajapaksa’s government and formed an alliance with Wickremesinghe to defeat Rajapaksa in the presidential election.
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“My dream becoming prime minister has faded away”.
“I will support good policies and oppose bad things“, the two-term president, who crushed a 26-year Tamil insurgency in 2009, said by telephone from his southern home of Hambantota.
The latest reported vote tally showed Rajapaksa’s alliance with 46 seats, compared with 44 for the Wickremesinghe-led United National Party and 11 for Tamil-majority parties. “This time too we have lost”. “It was a hard fight”.
Final results are due later in the afternoon, though analysts have suggested no party is expected to secure an absolute majority, meaning the UNP and Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe could struggle to make progress on long promised reforms towards greater government accountability.
The election commissioner Deshapriya said the vote, called a year ahead of schedule by President Maithripala Sirisena who ousted the veteran leader in January, had been one of the most peaceful in Sri Lanka’s history. Sri Lanka’s electoral system has a mixed format that includes district-level proportional representation as well as a so-called list system that gives each party extra parliamentary seats based on the number of votes they have gathered from across the country.
In Sri Lanka the prime minister acts for the president when he is absent and replaces him if he is impeached, is incapacitated or dies.
Sri Lanka’s election is a combination of proportional representation and preferential voting. Tamil National Alliance with 16 seats and the JVP with 6 are the next largest parties in the new parliament which will start functioning from the first of next month.
The result is also a blow to Rajapaksa’s ambitions to revive his political career.
“On August 17, the people of this country exercising their franchise in the parliamentary election confirmed the January 8 revolution and the good governance we have started”, he said.
Earlier this week Sirisena sent a letter to Rajapaksa, which he also released to the media, saying he would not appoint him prime minister even if he secures a majority in Parliament.
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India is expected to be relieved that Wickremesinghe is back as prime minister.
