Sri Lanka parliamentary poll: President Dissanayake’s NPP gets two-thirds majority

The NPP, which contested under the Malimawa (compass) symbol secured 159 out of the 225 seats in the parliament

Sri Lanka’s National People’s Power of President Anura Kumara Dissanayake on Friday (November 15, 2024) swept the parliamenteray elections by winning a two-thirds majority in the parliament, the Election Commission result said.

The NPP, which contested under the Malimawa (compass) symbol secured 159 out of the 225 seats in the parliament, according to the results on the Election Commission website.

Sri Lanka’s Samagi Jana Balawegaya headed by Sajith Premadasa was a distant second with 40 seats in Thursday’s poll which saw the lowest turnout since 2010.

The NPP also made history by winning the Northern Jaffna district.

Jaffna storm

In the northern Jaffna district, the cultural capital of the Tamil minority, NPP — the predominant Sinhala majority party from the south of the country — won the entire district over the traditional Tamil nationalist parties. The NPP won three out of the six seats in Jaffna province, stunning the traditional Tamil parties which dominated the scene.

No Sinhala majority parties have won Jaffna ever before. The grand old United National Party (UNP) had previously won an odd solitary seat in Jaffna. The NPP won the Jaffna district with over 80,000 votes and the grand old Tamil party trailed by a little over 63,000 in the final count of Thursday’s polling.

This resonated pre-election comments by President Dissanayake who said his party was being accepted as a truly national party by all communities. “The era of dividing and setting one community against the other has ended as people are embracing the NPP,” Mr. Dissanayake, the NPP leader, said.

The NPP under its original Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP) violently opposed any attempt of power sharing — a key Tamil demand during the armed separatist campaign of the LTTE. The Tamils only saw them as Sinhala majority racists.

The NPP received over 6.8 million or 61% of the votes counted, taking a commanding lead over its rivals.

The win in Parliament comes two months after Sri Lankans elected Mr. Dissanayake in a decisive election held after the country’s worst economic crisis since Independence.

NPP increases vote share across regions

The NPP increased its vote share across the island but secured an especially remarkable mandate in the north and east that is home to Tamils and Muslims. The poll results in this region overturns the image of the NPP’s chief constituent Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna [JVP or People’s Liberation Front] as an “anti-Tamil rights” party, based on the JVP’s fierce opposition in the 1980s to Tamils’ self-rule and the merger of the north and east.

Tamils and Muslims who voted for Mr. Dissanayake’s political rivals — mainly former Opposition Leader Sajith Premadasa — in the presidential election appear to have voted for the NPP, revealing its success in reaching out to ethnic minorities more recently. In almost all districts, barring Batticaloa in the east, the NPP beat prominent regional parties, representing Tamils and Muslims, signalling that the chant for change that dominated the Sinhala-majority south ahead of the September presidential polls had now travelled island-wide.

According to senior journalist and political commentator V. Thanabalasingham, Tamil political parties “are suffering the consequences of not introspecting the political path of the past” and believing they could “fool” the Tamils for a long time, going to Parliament with “only emotional nationalist slogans”. “It is too late for even an introspection,” he noted on social media platform ‘X’.

Mr. Dissanayake’s alliance also recorded big wins in the hill country across the island’s Central, Southern and Uva provinces, outdoing traditional parties representing the Malaiyaha Tamils.

This would be the first instance of a political party garnering a two-thirds majority in parliament under Sri Lanka’s proportional representation system, observed senior lawyer Saliya Peiris in a social media post.

“The result will also pave the way for the NPP Government to quickly honour its promise to abolish the Executive Presidency,” he said.

While the landslide win is a testament “that most people are happy with the direction of the country since the election of President Anura Kumara Dissanayake”, the NPP must resist the temptation to enact laws that will erode democratic rights and freedoms, Mr. Peiris cautioned, while managing “extraordinary expectations” of the electorate on political and economic fronts.

(With inputs from PTI)

Published - November 15, 2024 01:41 am IST