President Ranil Wickremesinghe addresses supporters after submitting his nomination papers for the upcoming presidential election, scheduled for September 21, in Colombo, Sri Lanka, August 15, 2024. | Photograph credit score: Reuters
COLOMBO
As many as 39 presidential hopefuls will contest a vital election in Sri Lanka on September 21, the Election Fee mentioned on Thursday (August 15, 2024), after the shut of nominations.
Present President Ranil Wickremesinghe, who got here to energy by way of a parliamentary vote in the course of the island nation’s 2022 disaster, is in search of a mandate to push by way of his authorities’s financial reform agenda.
Wickremesinghe, 75, is operating as an unbiased with a stance of “stability” whereas his primary rivals, opposition chief Sajith Premadasa, who break up from Wickremesinghe’s United Nationwide Social gathering over political variations, and Anura Kumara Dissanayake, who leads the centre-left Nationwide Individuals’s Energy alliance, are promising change.
Extra just lately, Namal Rajapaksa, son of former President Mahinda Rajapaksa, joined the race, turning into the primary distinguished member of the household to face the voters after a well-liked motion ousted them from energy in 2022, when the island skilled its worst monetary disaster in a long time. Lawyer Nuwan Bopage, a distinguished activist who represents a bit of the 2022 rebellion, can be operating for the newly fashioned Individuals’s Battle Alliance.
Addressing his supporters after submitting his nomination, President Wickremesinghe mentioned: “Had I not stepped ahead, [in 2022] Sri Lanka could be confronted with the disaster now plaguing Bangladesh… I request your mandate to proceed this work.”
Many Sri Lankans credit score Wickremesinghe with steering the nation by way of a troublesome time and placing its financial system on the highway to restoration. Nevertheless, his authorities’s austerity measures, launched as a part of a programme backed by the Worldwide Financial Fund, have hit most residents arduous. His opponents, Premadasa and Dissanayake, have promised to renegotiate the IMF package deal and ease Sri Lankans’ financial struggling.
Almost 17 million eligible voters could have a say on September 21, when the nation goes to the polls for the primary time since former President Gotabaya Rajapaksa was ousted by residents in 2022.
