Sri Lankan President Anura Kumara Dissanayake’s leftist coalition won a landslide in snap parliamentary polls on Friday, with voters rejecting establishment parties as triggering the economic crisis.The National People’s Power, contesting under the Malimawa (compass) symbol, won at least 123 seats in the 225-member parliament after securing around 62 percent of the vote in ballots counted so far, as per election commission data.The results for 25 out of total 196 seats were left to be declared. Another 29 seats were expected to be allocated to all parties based on the cumulative national polling.The NPP, which took a commanding lead over its rivals, is on track to get a two-third majority as it is expected to add to its tally a bulk from the 29 seats, taking the party to the absolute majority of 150 seats in the 225-member assembly.The party, which is the predominant Sinhala majority party from the southern part of the country, won the entire northern Jaffna district, which is the cultural capital of the Tamil minority. It did so by defeating traditional Tamil nationalist parties.It 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. But, the NPP won the Jaffna district with more than 80,000 votes while the grand old Tamil party trailed by a little over 63,000 in the final count.This resonated pre-election comments by 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,” he said.The election came a year ahead of schedule as Dissanayake dismissed the parliament immediately after taking charge as the president in September. The new parliament is set to meet next week.A self-avowed Marxist, the 55-year-old swept the September presidential elections on a promise to combat graft and recover stolen assets, two years after a slow-motion financial crash imposed widespread hardships on the island nation.Police said the nine-hour voting period passed without any incidents of violence, unlike most ballots of recent years, but three election workers including a police constable died due to illness while on duty.Voter turnout was estimated at under 70 percent, less than in the September presidential polls that saw nearly 80 percent eligible voters cast a ballot.Dissanayake had been an MP for nearly 25 years and was briefly an agriculture minister but his NPP coalition held just three seats in the outgoing assembly. He stormed to the presidency after successfully distancing himself from establishment politicians blamed for steering the country to its 2022 economic crisis.The financial crash was the worst in Buddhist-majority Sri Lanka’s history as an independent nation, sparking months-long shortages of food, fuel and essential medicines. The resulting public anger culminated in the storming of then-president Gotabaya Rajapaksa’s compound, prompting his resignation and temporary exile.(With agency inputs)
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