Sri Lanka’s Rajapaksa brothers secure landslide election win

COLOMBO: Sri Lanka’s ruling Rajapaksa brothers have secured a two-thirds majority in parliamentary elections, giving them sweeping powers to change the constitution.

Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapaksa’s Sri Lanka Podujana Party (SLPP) won 145 seats and has the support of at least five allies in the 225-member legislature, according to final results.

Rajapaksa, 74, and his brother Gotabaya, 71, who was elected president in November, needed to secure a super-majority to carry out their promised rollback of constitutional changes. With two-thirds votes in parliament, they can overturn the reforms made by the previous administration aimed at decentralising power. 

Official results showed the party received 6.8 million of the votes cast in Wednesday’s election, which was twice postponed because of the coronavirus pandemic. The turnout was more than 75 percent in the 16.2-million-strong electorate.

The Rajapaksa family has dominated Sri Lankan politics for the past two decades. Mahinda was president from 2005 to 2015 but was ousted after a revolt within his own party and backlash against alleged nepotism and corruption.

Gotabaya won comfortably in November’s presidential election and swiftly appointed Mahinda as his prime minister. Sri Lankans have largely embraced the family with the brothers riding a nationalist wave that followed Easter bombings in 2019 in which 279 people were killed.

The brothers are also viewed as heroes by the country’s Sinhalese majority for leading a military campaign to end a decades-long Tamil separatist war in 2009 when Mahinda was president and his brother a key figure in the military.

The election has left the opposition decimated. Former prime minister Ranil Wickremesinghe lost his constituency, and his party, which had 106 seats in the outgoing parliament, was reduced to just one seat.

A breakaway faction from Wickremesinghe’s party headed by the son of assassinated president Ranasinghe Premadasa, Sajith, got 20 percent of the vote and was a distant second with 54 seats.

A total of 196 seats in the 225-member house were decided on district proportional representation while the remaining 29 were decided on the basis of votes polled nationwide.

The moderate Tamil National Alliance (TNA) which had 16 seats in the outgoing parliament also suffered badly and was left with just 10 seats in the new assembly, which is due to sit on August 20. Former cricket World Cup-winning skipper Arjuna Ranatunga also lost his seat.