National People’s Power coalition candidate Anura Kumara Dissanayake will be Sri Lanka’s ninth President. Though shy of the 50 per cent plus one votes required for victory, Dissanayake is 1.3 million votes clear of his nearest rival, Sajith Premadasa of Samagi Jana Balawegaya (SJB).
It has been a very long wait for the party that Dissanayake heads, the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna, to reach the position of executive Presidency in Sri Lanka. The party now has only three MPs in parliament, despite having a good cadre strength and a history of anti-establishment struggles. In fact, a 2015 Facebook post by Dissanayake is now going viral. He had then said: “They tried to bury us. They didn’t know we were seeds.”
For the first time in Sri Lankan history, second preference votes had to be counted to elect a new President. The Sri Lankan Constitution mandates that a candidate has to secure 50 per cent plus one vote for a win. In the event of this not happening, voters’ second preference votes will be counted. In this count, all except the first two candidates are eliminated.
The second preference vote from the remaining votes is counted as a vote for either candidate against whose name the number has been marked. Both during the campaign stage and later during polling, there was confusion over how to mark the second preference vote and how to count because it was not done before. Despite this, the entire campaign, polling, and counting went off without any violent incidents.
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At the end of the first round of counting, Dissanayake was ahead with 42.31 per cent of the votes cast, and Sajith Premadasa was in second place with 32.76 per cent. A candidate has to get 50 per cent plus one vote to win.
Former Minister and SJB leader Champika Ranawaka offered a sobering comment to the victor: “58 per cent of the people voted against them.” The JVP has made it clear that it will begin the business of governance as soon as possible.
But when counting began, it appeared as if Dissanayake was sweeping. Of the 7 lakh plus registered postal votes, a majority voted for Dissanayake, giving the impression that this was a sweep election as in 2019. Even seasoned politicians were clear that the trend was set. Former Minister and SJB leader Harsha de Silva conceded defeat too: “We campaigned hard for Sajith Premadasa. But it was not to be...In the spirit of democracy and goodwill, I called and wished my friend [Dissanayake].”
Sri Lankan Foreign Minister Ali Sabry also followed suit: “In a democracy, it is crucial to honour the will of the people, and I do so without any hesitation. I extend my sincere congratulations.”
Sunday morning, as the first results from the general voters came in, it was clear that there was no sweep, as Frontline had predicted in an earlier piece. With Dissanayake preferring not to reach out to the minorities, he had to do exemplarily well to get 50 per cent from the 75 per cent Sinhalese vote. In 2019, Dissanayake did not even manage four per cent of the votes polled.
With this defeat, President Ranil Wickremesinghe has created a record of contesting the Presidential election thrice—1999, 2005 and 2024—and losing each time. Former President Mahinda Rajapaksa’s son and Member of Parliament Namal Rajapaksa secured a mere 2.36 per cent of the total votes cast and has nuked the political career of the entire Rajapaksa clan.
Anura Kumara Dissanayaka addresses supporters during a rally ahead of the presidential elections in Colombo on September 18, 2024. | Photo Credit: AFP
In fact, in most of the Rajapaksa strongholds, Dissanayake had a strong showing. Also, in Hambantota, the Rajapaksa home district, Dissanayake polled more than what Gotabaya Rajapaksa polled in his landslide win in 2019. The same is the situation in the historic Polonnaruwa, Galle, Ratnapura, and Monaragala.
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The Tamil common candidate, P. Ariyanethiran, secured just over 2.25 lakh votes (1.7 per cent). Ariyanethiran had stated that his candidature was to highlight the fact that the Tamils have not got any political solution and that no candidate in the race had any plan to further the interests of the Tamils.
But his candidature did much more than that: It divided the most important Tamil political party in the island nation, the Ilankai Tamil Arasu Katchi (ITAK), and has weakened the common cause of seeking a political solution to Tamil aspirations. Given the fact that the ITAK president S. Sritharan and the ITAK’s apex committee are at loggerheads, it appears that the party is headed for a split.
A President like Dissanayake, who fared poorly in the Tamil areas because he has no significant plans to address Tamil hopes and aspirations, will not help the Tamil cause either. The other apprehension against Dissanayake is because the party, though claiming to profess Marxist ideology, has been firmly entrenched in Sri Lanka’s majoritarian Sinhala-Buddhist rhetoric, and has, in the past, been part of two insurrections to overthrow governments.
