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Leftist lawmaker Anura Kumara Dissanayake won Sri Lanka’s presidential election Sunday after competing in the country’s first ever runoff. The election was the first since protests unseated former president, Gotabaya Rajapaksa, in 2022 in the midst of a spiraling economic crisis, with voters sweeping out Rajapaksa’s successor, incumbent Ranil Wickremesinghe.
Dissanayake, who is a member of the Marxist Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna, ran on an anti-corruption campaign that blamed the establishment for the country’s civil unrest and the island country’s first-ever debt default in 2022. The platform, the BBC noted, seems to have been enough to quell any trepidation over electing him — the JVP has a “violent past” that saw it lead armed insurrections against the government in the 1970s and 1980s.
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Dissanayake has made several economic promises, including a pledge to negotiate a new $3 billion bailout for the country with the International Monetary Fund, Bloomberg reported. A previous deal with the IMF negotiated by Wickremesinghe in 2023 stipulated steep austerity measures and tax hikes that were incredibly unpopular with the electorate.
Despite his party’s historical anti-India and pro-China bent, Dissanayake has signaled a shift in his stance toward both countries, suggesting that Sri Lanka would not seek to take sides in any geopolitical race between Beijing and New Delhi, The Times of India noted.