COLOMBO, Sri Lanka — Marxist candidate Anura Kumara Dissanayake led the early counting in Sri Lanka’s presidential elections Sunday, riding a wave of popular anger at the established political order that has run the South Asian nation’s economy into the ground.
If Dissanayake, 55, is confirmed as president, it would be a remarkable turnaround for his half-century-old leftist party, Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna, which had long remained on the margins.
In recent years, he led a rebranding effort of an organization once known for deadly insurrections: building a large coalition, softening its radical positions, and pitching it as the answer to the politics of patronage that has brought only hardship to many of the island nation’s roughly 23 million people.
Early results showed that Dissanayake led with about 50% of votes amid high turnout, an estimated 75% to 80%. His closest competitor had received about 20% of the votes cast.
At least three senior leaders of his opposition, including Sri Lanka’s current foreign minister, had already put out messages congratulating him on his imminent victory, as dawn broke on the continuing overnight vote counting.
In Sri Lanka’s election system, voters can mark one candidate on their ballot or rank three candidates in order of preference. If no one candidate gets 50% or more of the vote in the first counting, a second round of counting factors in the second preference of voters whose first choice did not make it to the top two.
At the end of a peaceful and orderly vote Saturday, the government made a surprise announcement of an overnight curfew as the counting continued. But a statement of support from Dissanayake’s camp suggested it was a coordinated effort to prevent violence, rather than anything sinister.
It is the first time a presidential election in Sri Lanka has appeared genuinely multipronged, in contrast to a history of direct competition between coalitions formed by the two parties that have dominated since the nation became a republic in 1972.
While officially more than 30 candidates were contesting, the majority of the votes were split among three front-runners.
The popular protest movement that forced the powerful Rajapaksa clan out of power in 2022 threw the political landscape wide open, the anger reshaping the dynamics down to the local level.
Before its fall, the Rajapaksa government had become a family affair, with various relatives serving as president and prime minister, as well as helming several ministries and key positions. But its fall has been so thorough that Namal Rajapaksa, the family’s 38-year-old political heir and presidential candidate in the current election, was a distant fourth, with a single-digit share of the votes, based on the early trends.
Ranil Wickremesinghe, a 75-year-old political survivor who stepped in as interim president after Gotabaya Rajapaksa fled the country when protesters surrounded his home, has helped stabilize the country and negotiated a bailout package with the International Monetary Fund.
But Wickremesinghe was also trailing far behind in Saturday’s vote, with his roughly 17% of the votes putting him in third place — a sign of anger over his austerity measures that have pinched the poor hard, and of his lasting public image as part of the discredited old guard.
The main contender for runner-up was Sajith Premadasa, the opposition leader, who was formerly in Wickremesinghe’s party before a messy public split. His share of the votes in the early trends was about 25%.
Dissanayake positioned his National People’s Power coalition, built around his old JVP party as its largest partner, as the best positioned to deliver the public demands of the protest movement for cleaning up Sri Lanka’s deeply entrenched political patronage and corruption. He brought in new faces at the top and focused on reaching out to and mobilizing women, who were particularly hard hit by the economic collapse. He also softened his own party’s old radical Marxist messaging.
His efforts appeared to have resonated with a tired public ready for change.
“I’m voting for the Compass this time,” said Saman Ratnasiri, 49, an auto-rickshaw driver in Colombo, referring to the election symbol of Dissanayake’s coalition. He said he had never voted for Dissanayake before, but he wanted to give his outfit a shot after other leaders had failed him.
“If we don’t get it right this time also, then I might as well forget about this country,” he added.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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