Sri Lanka’s leftist ruling coalition headed for landslide election win
Al Jazeera
Sri Lankan president’s National People’s Power wins 63 percent of the vote, early results show.
Sri Lankan President Anura Kumara Dissanayake’s leftist coalition is on track for a landslide victory in snap elections, delivering the Marxist-leaning leader a powerful mandate to ease punishing austerity measures in the crisis-stricken nation.
With well over half of the ballots counted on Friday morning, Dissanayake’s National People’s Power (NPP) was far ahead of the opposition alliance Samagi Jana Balawegaya (SJB) with 63 percent of the vote, according to early results from the country’s Election Commission.
The NPP had taken 97 seats in the 225-member parliament, compared with 26 seats for the SBJ, and was leading in all but one of 22 electoral districts, according to the results.
Voter turnout in Thursday’s vote was about 65 percent, according to the election commission, less than in September’s presidential election when nearly 80 percent of eligible voters cast a ballot.
Dissanayake won September’s presidential poll riding a wave of popular discontent with austerity measures imposed by his predecessor, Ranil Wickremesinghe, as a part of a bailout deal with the International Monetary Fund (IMF).
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