On Sept. 21, Sri Lanka will maintain its first presidential election for the reason that July 2022 well-liked rebellion often known as the Aragalaya, which drove then-President Gotabaya Rajapaksa from energy. Within the two years since then, Rajapaksa’s successor, present President Ranil Wickremesinghe, has managed to enact some coverage reforms that unlocked much-needed aid from the Worldwide Financial Fund, permitting the nation to regain some political and financial stability.
Nonetheless, current polls recommend that Anura Kumara Dissanayake, a longtime opposition determine and chief of the Individuals’s Liberation Entrance, or JVP, is about to be the frontrunner within the upcoming presidential election. Historically a Marxist-Leninist celebration, the JVP has developed from a fringe faction recognized for its revolutionary previous right into a distinguished anti-establishment drive. It’s now the main formation within the Nationwide Individuals’s Energy, or NPP, political alliance, which itself has surged in Sri Lanka’s post-Aragalaya political scene. What explains Dissanayake’s rise, and what does his ascent sign for Sri Lanka’s overseas coverage orientation?
The NPP’s Submit-Aragalaya Ascendance
The JVP is infamous for its historical past of violent political insurgency. Established within the Sixties as a Marxist-Leninist celebration, it led armed uprisings in opposition to the Sri Lankan authorities within the early Nineteen Seventies and late Nineteen Eighties, earlier than transitioning right into a viable electoral celebration within the mid-Nineties. It gained prominence within the early 2000s because the principal political drive opposing the Norwegian-mediated peace course of between the then-government and the separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, or LTTE.
