Sri Lankans reject former president in election

Sri Lankan voters decisively rejected former president Mahinda Rajapaksa’s comeback bid, election results showed on Tuesday, leaving this island nation firmly in the hands of officials intent on dismantling most of his policies and completing corruption inquiries that have been closing in on him and his family.

“We have lost a good fight,” Mr Rajapaksa told Agence France-Presse. The election, held peacefully on Monday with high voter turnout, determined the makeup of Sri Lanka’s 225-member parliament. As expected, Mr Rajapaksa easily won a seat in the chamber. But his political coalition fell short of winning a majority, which he had said would have earned him the right to be named prime minister, the second most powerful job in the government.

Although final results had still not been announced, partial returns indicated that Mr Rajapaksa’s coalition lost support in every region of the country, including areas long viewed as his political base.

"The election very clearly demonstrated there is no well of support for him," said Jayadeva Uyangoda, a professor of political science at the University of Colombo. Instead, the results strengthened his archrivals: Maithripala Sirisena, the president, and Ranil Wickremesinghe, the prime minister, odd-couple political partners who joined forces to oppose Mr Rajapaksa.

“We need to unite as one family to create a new political culture in this country,” said Mr Wickremesinghe in a statement claiming victory. “With one heart, we should strive to ensure our country can meet the challenges of the modern age and rise to the top.”

On January 8th, Mr Wickremesinghe and Mr Sirisena struck their first blow against Mr Rajapaksa by defeating his bid for an unprecedented third term as president. In the months since, they have teamed to begin tearing down Mr Rajapaksa’s most cherished project: building an elaborate ruling structure that gave him and his family immense, unchallenged power over the nation’s military, economy and news media.

On Monday, by reaffirming the rejection of Mr Rajapaksa in January, voters guaranteed that the changes begun by Mr Wickremesinghe and Mr Sirisena will continue, including nascent efforts to bridge deep divisions left when Rajapaksa crushed a 26-year Tamil uprising in 2009.

“The majority of this country has voted to consolidate the gains of the January 8th revolution and take forward the policies of good governance and consensus,” said Mr Wickremesinghe. The result also increases the likelihood that there will be a careful accounting of Mr Rajapaksa’s decade in power. His opponents accuse him and his family of plundering billions of dollars from the national treasury, a charge he has vehemently denied.

“Whatever you may say, we are not thieves,” he told reporters last week. But the roster of his former ministers and close associates under investigation is steadily growing, and several inquiries are now aimed directly at Mr Rajapaksa and his family. In April, the Sri Lankan police arrested his brother Basil, the former economic development minister, on charges of misappropriating public funds. The same month, another brother, Gotabhaya, the former defence secretary, was summoned to appear before the nation’s Bribery Commission. In June, his wife, Shiranthi, was questioned by the newly formed Financial Crime Investigation Division.

Allegations

This month, government sources accused one of Mr Rajapaksa's sons, Yoshitha, of ordering the killing of Wasim Thajudeen, a member of Sri Lanka's national rugby team, in a dispute over a woman. According to officials, three members of his father's security detail have been identified as the men who abducted, tortured and killed Thajudeen in 2012.

As part of his campaign this summer, Mr Rajapaksa had pledged to stop many of those investigations, portraying them as nothing more than a political witch hunt. The latest election loss, though, means "almost certain prosecution" for Mr Rajapaksa, said Paikiasothy Saravanamuttu, who runs an election monitoring group and a policy research organization in Sri Lanka.

Mr Rajapaksa had also sought to mobilise voters against a UN investigation into allegations of war crimes during the last stages of the war against Tamil separatists. UN officials have estimated that as many as 40,000 civilians died in the final assault on the Tamil-dominated north in 2009.

"Are you going to vote to divide this country and take us to court in Geneva?" Mr Rajapaksa asked at one recent rally. Monday's results also have significant geopolitical ramifications. As president, Mr Rajapaksa aggressively courted China, building economic and military ties that alarmed India and the United States. Neither country wants China to gain a larger presence on an island so strategically located along the maritime trade routes between the Bay of Bengal and the Arabian Sea. Mr Sirisena and Mr Wickremesinghe have put the courtship on pause, saying the relationship with China needs to be "rebalanced."

On Tuesday, Mr Rajapaksa seemed ready to embrace a new role, taking up the mantle of opposition leader in parliament. “I will support good policies and oppose bad things,” he told Reuters.

– (New York Times service)