International Crisis Group

Sri Lanka election set to be closest and most significant in decades | Jason Burke 

Voters in Sri Lanka will go to the polls on Thursday in one of the tightest and most significant presidential elections in the island nation for decades.

Mahinda Rajapaksa, already the longest-serving ruler in the region, will seek a third term that would allow him to consolidate what critics say is an increasingly authoritarian and dynastic rule.

But the 69-year-old politician’s decision to call early elections in the hope of an easy victory over a fragmented opposition now looks questionable with a broad coalition of parties rallying behind his former associate turned rival, Maithripala Sirisena.

“It is very unpredictable. It could be very, very close,” said Alan Keenan, an expert with the International Crisis Group.

Few observers expected the poll – which will be won by whoever wins more than 50% of votes cast – to be a genuine contest. Elected first in 2005, Rajapaksa won a landslide in 2010 after bringing Sri Lanka’s 26-year-old civil war to a successful, if bloody, conclusion.

FULL ARTICLE (The Guardian)

Photo: President Mahinda Rajapaksa’s Media - Photo Unit/flickr