COLOMBO: Sri Lankans on Thursday began voting in the snap parliamentary election, the first major test of the ruling National People’s Power party led by President Anura Kumara Dissanayake.
The voting is taking place at over 13,314 polling stations across the country. The voting started at 7 am and will continue till 4 pm local time. The counting will start soon after the closing of polls.
Voters turned out in steady streams during the first hour of the polls, election officials said.
Over 17 million voters from the island’s 21 million population are eligible to vote for the 225-member Parliament for a five-year term.
Nearly 90,000 security personnel from the police and the military are deployed to provide security at the election venues.
Thursday’s vote would be the first major test of the popularity of the ruling party, National People’s Power, led by President Dissanayake.
Having failed to secure 50 per cent of the vote at the September 21 presidential election, Dissanayake is pleading for a stronger parliament with well over a simple majority of 113 seats to implement his anti-corruption accountability reformist programme.
This will be the first parliamentary election since Sri Lanka plunged into an economic crisis when the island nation declared sovereign default in mid-April of 2022, its first since gaining independence from Britain in 1948. Almost civil-war-like conditions and months of public protests led to the fleeing of the then president Gotabaya Rajapaksa.
Since assuming office, Dissanayake has stayed on course with his predecessor Ranil Wickremesinghe’s International Monetary Fund (IMF) bailout programme.
The country is still recovering from its worst economic crisis in history as the Dissanayake government faces the challenge of meeting the IMF targets on revenue in the third review of the USD 2.9 billion programme.
As many as 196 members are to be elected from the 22 districts based on the proportional representation system while 29 would be elected from the cumulative votes polled national list to provide a 225-member Parliament for a five-year term.
Political parties and independent groups file lists of candidates for each district. Seats are allocated proportionately according to the votes polled.
Individual MPs get elected based on the preferential votes cast in their favour. Each voter is entitled to mark three individual preferences.
Wickremesinghe, who lost to Dissanayake in last month’s presidential election, has not been contesting the parliamentary election for the first time since 1977.
The Rajapaksa brothers – Mahinda, Gotabaya, Chamal and Basil – too are not contesting this election after decades-long representation.
Scores of ministers and deputies from the past regime have opted out of the race.
Under the complex proportional representation system, Dissanayake’s NPP will be hard-pressed to gain the absolute majority required for initiating major reforms such as overhauling the presidential system.
“We should win big enough to make them cry,” Dissanayake said, referring to the ruling classes against whom his party had run two bloody rebellions.
After Dissanayake’s win in the presidential election held in September, the main opposition Samagi Jana Balawegaya (SJB) and Wickremesinghe-backed New Democratic Front (NDF) seemed to have thrown a feeble challenge to gain control of Parliament, the analysts noted.