Anura Kumara Dissanayake, a leftist politician, has taken a commanding won in Sri Lanka's presidential election. The election on Saturday is the first to be held since mass protests unseated the country's leader, Gotabaya Rajapaksa, in 2022 after the country suffered its worst economic crisis.
Dissanayake promised voters tough anti-corruption measures and good governance - messages that have resonated strongly with voters who have been clamouring for systematic change since the crisis.
Early results on Sunday morning showed Dissanayake with a commanding lead, winning close to 50% of votes counted. A candidate needs 51% of the total vote to be declared the winner.
Mr Premadasa is in second place with nearly 26% of the total vote. President Ranil Wickremesinghe, who is seeking a second term, has so far received 16% while Namal Rajapaksa, the nephew of the ousted president has got close to 3%. Seventeen million Sri Lankans were eligible to vote on Saturday.
Voting proceeded peacefully, although authorities declared a curfew on Sunday morning which was extended until until noon local time (0:630 GMT).
Dissanayake has already received messages of congratulations from supporters of his two main rivals, incumbent president Ranil Wickremesinghe and opposition leader Sajith Premadasa.
Foreign Minister Ali Sabry said on X that early results clearly pointed to a victory by Dissanayake.
"Though I heavily campaigned for President Ranil Wickremesinghe, the people of Sri Lanka have made their decision, and I fully respect their mandate for Anura Kumara Dissanayake," he said.
MP Harsha de Silva, who supported Premadasa, said he has called Dissanayake to offer his congratulations.
“We campaigned hard for @sajithpremadasa but it was not to be. It is now clear @anuradisanayake will be the new President of #SriLanka," said de Silva, who represents Colombo in parliament.
Another Premadasa supporter, Tamil National Alliance (TNA) spokesman MA Sumanthiran, said Dissanayake delivered an "impressive win" without relying on "racial or religious chauvinism". A curfew has been imposed in Sri Lanka from 10 pm tonight to 6 am on Sunday as a precaution to prevent any untoward incident following the presidential election, police said.
President Ranil Wickremesinghe issued a gazette imposing the curfew order.
The curfew announcement came as the counting of votes is being held. The first results are yet to be declared.The voter turnout in the presidential election is estimated to be around 75 per cent, according to an official.
Director General Elections Saman Sri Ratnayaka announced that the voter turnout in the presidential election is expected to be 75 per cent, which would be lower than the 83 per cent voter turnout recorded in the previous presidential election held in November 2019.
The polls were held from 7 am to 4 pm local time at over 13,400 polling stations at 22 electoral districts.
Over 17 million registered voters were expected to vote in the election which had the highest number of candidates with 38 in the fray.
Dissanayake was born on 24 November, 1968 in Galewela, a multi-cultural and multi-religious town in central Sri Lanka.
Raised as a member of the middle-class, he is public school educated, has a degree in physics, and first entered politics as a student around the time when the Indo-Sri Lanka Agreement was signed in 1987: an event that would lead to one of Sri Lanka’s bloodiest periods.
From 1987 to 1989, the Janatha Vimukti Peramuna (JVP) - a Marxist political party with which Dissanayake would later become closely associated - spearheaded an armed revolt against the Sri Lankan government.
The insurrectionist campaign, spurred by discontent among the youth of the rural lower and middle classes, precipitated a conflict marked by raids, assassinations and attacks against both political opponents and civilians which claimed thousands of lives.
Dissanayake, who was elected to the JVP’s central committee in 1997 and became its leader in 2008, has since apologised for the group’s violence during this so-called "season of terror".
"A lot of things happened during the armed conflict that should not have happened," he said in a 2014 interview with the BBC.
"We are still shocked, and shocked that things happened at our hands that should not have happened. We are always deeply saddened and shocked about that."
The JVP, which currently has just three seats in parliament, is part of the NPP coalition that Dissanayake now heads.
While campaigning for the presidential election, Dissanayake addressed another violent moment in Sri Lanka’s recent history: the 2019 Easter Sunday bombings.
On 21 April 2019, a succession of deadly blasts tore through churches and international hotels across the capital Colombo, killing at least 290 people and injuring hundreds more in what quickly became the worst attack in Sri Lanka’s history.
Five years later, however, investigations into how the co-ordinated attacks happened, and the security failures that led to them, have failed to provide answers.
Some have accused the former government, led by Gotabaya Rajapaksa, of obstructing investigations.
In a recent interview with BBC Sinhala, Dissanayake promised he would hold an investigation into the matter if elected – suggesting that authorities had avoided doing so because they were afraid of revealing "their own responsibility".
It’s just one of many unfulfilled promises from Sri Lanka’s political elite, he added.
"It’s not just this investigation," he said. "Politicians who promised to stop corruption have engaged in corruption; those who promised to create a debt-free Sri Lanka have only worsened the debt burden; people who promised to strengthen the law have broken it.
"This is exactly why the people of this country want different leadership. We are the ones who can provide it."
