The Sri Lankan Election Commission has declared Anura Kumara Dissanayake as winner of the country’s Presidential election.
The commission said on Sunday that Dissanayake aged 55, is the leader of People’s Liberation Front (JVP) party won the election with 42.31 percent of the vote cast in the election.
The leader of the opposition Sajith Premadasa took second place with 32.76 percent of the vote held on Saturday.
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Also, outgoing President Ranil Wickremesinghe – who took office at the peak of the 2022 economic collapse and imposed tough austerity policies per the terms of an International Monetary Fund (IMF) bailout – took a distant third place with 17.27 percent of the votes polled.
It was the first time in Sri Lanka’s history that the presidential race was decided by a second round of counting after the top two candidates failed to win the mandatory 50 percent of votes.
According to election commission officials, the president-elect Dissanayake is expected to be sworn in on Monday at the colonial-era President Secretariat in the main city of Colombo, the country’s capital.
Aljazeera media network reports that in his thank you speech to the public, Dissanayake has called for unity to all Sri Lankans including Sinhalese, Tamils, and Muslim communities.
According to him, “new renaissance will rise from this shared strength and vision”.
“The dream we have nurtured for centuries is finally coming true. This achievement is not the result of any single person’s work, but the collective effort of hundreds of thousands of you. Your commitment has brought us this far, and for that, I am deeply grateful. This victory belongs to all of us,” he said in a post on X.
Meanwhile, Mr. Dissanayake has bowed to fixed Colombo’s struggling economy as it was the reasons for his emergence.
Source: ALJAZEERA