According to official election results released on Friday, November 15, Anura Kumara Dissanayake, the Sri Lanka’s new president with a Marxist leaning, has a majority in Parliament, which gives him a solid mandate for his economic recovery agenda.
At least 123 of the 225 seats in Parliament have been won by Anura Kumara Dissanayake’s National People’s Power Party, according to Election Commission findings, the Associated Press said. Under the leadership of opposition leader Sajith Premedasa, the Samagi Jana Balawegaya (United People’s Power Party) won 31 seats.
On September 21, Dissanayake won the presidency by defeating the established political parties that had controlled Sri Lanka since the country’s 1948 independence. Even though his party only garnered 42% of the vote, casting doubt on its chances in the legislative elections, Dissanayake’s party had a sharp increase in support in the two months since he took office.
The Jaffna district, the center of the ethnic Tamil population in the north, and numerous other minority strongholds were won by Dissanayake’s party in a huge upset that marked a dramatic change in Sri Lanka’s electoral environment.
For the traditional ethnic Tamil parties that have controlled northern politics since independence, this Jaffna triumph is a serious setback. Tamils, who have traditionally been suspicious of leaders with a Sinhalese majority, are also showing signs of change. From 1983 to 2009, ethnic Tamil separatists waged an unsuccessful civil war in which they sought to establish a separate country, claiming that Sinhalese-led governments had marginalized them.
Conservative UN estimates place the death toll from the Sri Lankan civil war at over 100,000. 196 of the 225 parliamentary seats were up for grabs under Sri Lanka’s proportional representation system, which gives seats to parties according to the percentage of votes they obtain in each district.
Depending on their share of the national vote, parties and independent organizations are given the remaining 29 seats, also referred to as national list seats.
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