From Sumit Ganguly, a columnist at *Foreign Policy* and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University:
“The economy was undoubtedly the central issue in Sri Lanka’s presidential election on Sept. 21—unlike in past votes, when ethnic divides between the Sinhala Buddhist majority and the Tamil minority played a more prominent role. Two years ago, Sri Lanka plunged into an unprecedented fiscal crisis driven by the COVID-19 pandemic—which decimated tourism, a major source of the country’s revenue—and economic mismanagement by then-President Gotabaya Rajapaksa, who resigned in July 2022.
Sri Lanka’s interim president, Ranil Wickremesinghe, tamed inflation and restored some economic growth while agreeing to an International Monetary Fund deal that came with substantial austerity measures. However, Wickremesinghe’s association with the political elite that presided over the 2022 crisis hurt him in the polls, where he came in a distant third among the main contenders. Anura Kumara Dissanayake, the Marxist-leaning leader of the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP) party, emerged as the winner on Saturday…”
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From Sumit Ganguly, a columnist at *Foreign Policy* and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University:
“The economy was undoubtedly the central issue in Sri Lanka’s presidential election on Sept. 21—unlike in past votes, when ethnic divides between the Sinhala Buddhist majority and the Tamil minority played a more prominent role. Two years ago, Sri Lanka plunged into an unprecedented fiscal crisis driven by the COVID-19 pandemic—which decimated tourism, a major source of the country’s revenue—and economic mismanagement by then-President Gotabaya Rajapaksa, who resigned in July 2022.
Sri Lanka’s interim president, Ranil Wickremesinghe, tamed inflation and restored some economic growth while agreeing to an International Monetary Fund deal that came with substantial austerity measures. However, Wickremesinghe’s association with the political elite that presided over the 2022 crisis hurt him in the polls, where he came in a distant third among the main contenders. Anura Kumara Dissanayake, the Marxist-leaning leader of the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP) party, emerged as the winner on Saturday…”