Colombo, Sri Lanka (AP) — Marxist politician Anura Dissanayake won Sri Lanka’s presidential election over the weekend, dealing a blow to a political old guard that has been widely blamed for the unprecedented economic crisis that hit the South Asian island nation two years ago.
Dissanayake, whose pro-working class populist campaign won him youth support, secured victory over opposition leader Sajith Premadasa, the runner up; and incumbent President Ranil Wickremesinghe, who took over the country two years ago after its economy hit bottom.
RELATED NEWS : Sri Lanka Election 2024: Who Might Be the Next President and What’s at Stake?
Dissanayake is the leader of National People’s Power alliance, and of the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna, or People’s Liberation Front, a Marxist political party that waged two unsuccessful armed insurrections in 1970s and 1980s to capture power through socialist revolution.
Early interest in politics
Born on Nov. 24, 1968 into an ordinary family in a paddy-growing central part of Sri Lanka, Dissanayake was politically active from his school days, taking part in student demonstrations against an agreement with India to grant a degree of self rule to Sri Lanka’s Tamil minority in an effort to resolve the demands for autonomy that later erupted into a decades-long civil war.
Dissanayake political involvement was further sharpened when he entered university to read for his science degree and joined the Socialist Students’ Union, the student wing of the JVP, which had already staged one armed insurrection in 1971 before giving up arms and entering politics.
Parliamentary politics
Dissanayake entered public politics in 1993, working to rebuild the party under a new leader-in-exile, Somawansa Amarasinghe. The party won its first seat in Parliament in 1994, signalling its re-entry into democratic politics.
Dissanayake became national organiser of the Socialist Students’ Union in 1997 and the same year, he was added to to the Central Committee of the JVP. One year later, he joined the party’s politburo.
Dissanayake was elected to Parliament in 2000, and when the JVP entered an alliance with President Chandrika Kumaratunga, he briefly served as agriculture and irrigation minister.
That alliance was formed to oppose a cease-fire agreement signed between then-Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe and the now-defeated Tamil Tiger rebels to resolve the separatist conflict that had blown into a full scale civil war.
Later, Dissanayake and the JVP backed former President Mahinda Rajapaksa to militarily defeat the rebels in 2009.
He was elected JVP leader in 2014, after a party schism in which a radical left wing broke off to form a new party.