COLOMBO: Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa suffered a political blow yesterday when his ruling party’s popularity dropped sharply in a local election seen as a gauge for possible snap presidential polls.
Although Rajapaksa’s United People’s Freedom Alliance (UPFA) won the election in the southeastern province of Uva, its share of the vote dropped by more than 20 percentage points from the last polls there in 2009.
The UPFA secured 19 out of the 34 seats in the election for the Uva provincial council held on Saturday and won 51.24 percent of the vote, according to revised results released by the Department of Elections.
UPFA politician Dayasiri Jayasekera accused unnamed foreign governments of trying to engineer “regime change” by supporting the main opposition United National Party (UNP), which more than doubled its vote.
“These foreign governments stood for the victory of the UNP and treated this election as the start of a campaign for regime change,” said Jayasekera, who is a ruling party chief minister for another province.
However, the UPFA expressed confidence in winning future national elections although the opposition UNP said it was time for the Rajapaksa administration to go. “The people have rejected the lawlessness and impunity perpetrated by the incumbent regime,” the UNP said.
The election was seen as a crucial test of whether Rajapaksa has enough support to call snap presidential polls for January, when candidates need more than 50 percent of the vote to win.
Political analyst Victor Ivan said the results were a setback for Rajapaksa, who personally campaigned in Uva to shore up his party’s vote — only to oversee its worst decline since he came to power in 2005.
The province, which includes the tea-growing district of Badulla and sugar-growing area of Moneragala, was previously considered a UPFA stronghold, led by the president’s nephew Shasheendra Rajapaksa.
“This is a personal setback for the president,” Ivan said. “He will have to go for radical reforms to correct course or he will increasingly become irrelevant.” Ivan, as well as other newspaper columnists, had speculated that Rajapaksa would attempt re-election for a third term in early 2015 off the back of a strong win in Uva.
In previous local polls Rajapaksa, who has consolidated his power since 2005, has taken advantage of his popularity among the Sinhalese majority for crushing Tamil rebels and ending the 37-year-long separatist war in 2009.
“People were grateful to him for the war victory and gave him another term (in 2010), but you can’t take that gratitude for granted,” Ivan said. “He can no longer capitalise on the military success.”
Rajapaksa has stared down international allegations of war crimes, including claims that his troops killed up to 40,000 ethnic minority Tamil civilians in the final stages of the conflict.
Colombo is under international pressure to cooperate with a UN-mandated probe into the allegations, which Rajapaksa denies.
Just before Saturday’s election, Rajapaksa slashed electricity tariffs nationally by 25 percent, reduced fuel prices by three percent and secured investments from Japan and China that he says promise more jobs and prosperity.
Presidential elections are due in November 2016, but Rajapaksa has the power to call them at any time. Saturday’s election came after two similar polls elsewhere in March in which the UPFA saw declines of 10 to 12 percent.
AFP
