Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapaksa-led Sri Lanka People’s Party (SLPP) registered a landslide victory in the Sri Lankan Parliamentary Elections on August 5, 2020. The party and its allies secured two-thirds of the seats at the elections.
Sri Lanka People’s Party (SLPP) won 145 seats in the 225-member parliament, while the allies managed to clinch more than five seats. Out of the total vote percentage, SLPP got around 59 percent of the popular vote, while SJB garnered around 23 percent of votes. The SJB is an offshoot of UNP, which was formed earlier this year.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi was one of the first world leaders to congratulate Mahinda Rajapaksha on his win. The Sri Lankan leader tweeted thanking PM Modi for his congratulatory phone call. He said that he looked forward to working with him closely to further enhance the long-standing cooperation between India and Sri Lanka.
Thank you, Prime Minister @PresRajapaksa! It was a pleasure to speak to you. Once again, many congratulations. We will work together to further advance all areas of bilateral cooperation and to take our special ties to ever newer heights. https://t.co/123ahoxlMo
— Narendra Modi (@narendramodi) August 6, 2020
Key Highlights
• Mahinda Rajapaksa is expected to be sworn in as the Prime Minister of Sri Lanka over the weekend. His government will be elected for a five-year term.
• Former Prime Minister’s Ranil Wickremesinghe’s United National Party (UNP) suffered the biggest setback in the General Elections, as it managed to win only one seat.
• The party’s leader and a four-time Prime Minister was unseated for the first time since he entered parliament in 1977. Wickremesinghe failed to win from Colombo district as his party finished fourth in most constituencies.
• The UNP only polled 249,435 votes or just 2 percent of the votes and came at the fifth position nationally.
• However, Wickremesinghe’s former deputy and the presidential candidate Sajith Premadasa, who broke away from the UNP to form his own party SJB, performed well by winning 55 seats. The SJB polled 2.7 million votes or 23 percent of the vote share and emerged as the second-largest party, as per the General Election results.
• The Tamil National Alliance, the main political group of ethnic Tamils, suffered a setback as it could win only 10 seats this time in comparison to the earlier 16 during the 2015 elections.
• The Marxist JVP also won just 3 seats, down from their 6 in the previous election.
Background
Former President Mahinda Rajapaksa had taken oath as the new Prime Minister of Sri Lanka on November 21, 2019 after Ranil Wickremesinghe resigned from his post after his presidential election defeat to Rajapaksa’s younger brother Gotabaya Rajapaksa.
However, President Gotabaya Rajapaksa, decided to call for snap elections six months ahead of the schedule, as he was seeking a stronger majority in the Parliament to implement his policies. He dissolved the Sri Lankan Parliament on March 2, 2020.
The snap elections were initially supposed to be held on April 25 but Sri Lanka’s Election Commission decided to postpone the elections to June 20 in the wake of the coronavirus outbreak in the nation. The commission informed in June that the elections cannot be held on June 20 due to health threat still remaining because of the coronavirus pandemic and the new date was decided unanimously.
Comments
All Comments (0)
Join the conversation