Sri Lanka Crisis: Protests over an economic crisis culminated in Rajapaksa announcing his resignation
Sri Lanka's parliament is voting to elect a new president to replace Gotabaya Rajapaksa, who fled the country last week as his palace was stormed by angry protesters.
Here are 10 facts from this big story
- The winner of the three-way contest to succeed Gotabaya Rajapaksa will take charge of a bankrupt nation that is in bailout talks with the IMF, with its 22 million people enduring severe shortages of food, fuel and medicine.
- Analysts say the frontrunner is Ranil Wickremesinghe, a six-time former prime minister who became acting president after his predecessor resigned, but is despised by the protesters who see him as a Rajapaksa ally.
- Months of demonstrations over an unprecedented economic crisis culminated in Rajapaksa announcing his resignation from Singapore last week, days after troops rescued the leader from his besieged compound.
- Rajapaksa's departure wounds a once-powerful ruling clan that has dominated Sri Lankan politics for most of the past two decades, after his brothers also quit their posts as premier and finance minister earlier this year.
- Wickremesinghe, 73, has the backing of the Rajapaksas' SLPP, the largest bloc in the 225-member parliament, for today's secret ballot. As acting president, he has extended a state of emergency that gives police and security forces sweeping powers.
- An opposition MP said Wickremesinghe's hardline stance against demonstrators was going down well with MPs who had been at the receiving end of mob violence, and most SLPP legislators would side with him. "Ranil is emerging as the law-and-order candidate," Tamil MP Dharmalingam Sithadthan told AFP.
- Observers believe that Wickremesinghe will crack down hard if he wins and the demonstrators -- who have also been demanding his resignation, accusing him of protecting the Rajapaksas' interests -- take to the streets.
- His main opponent in the vote will be SLPP dissident and former education minister Dullas Alahapperuma, a former journalist who is being supported by the opposition. Alahapperuma pledged this week to form "an actual consensual government for the first time in our history".
- If he wins, the 63-year-old is expected to name opposition leader Sajith Premadasa as his prime minister. Premadasa's late father Ranasinghe ruled the country with an iron fist in the 1980s, when Alahapperuma was a rights campaigner.
- The third candidate is Anura Dissanayake, 53, leader of the leftist People's Liberation Front (JVP), whose coalition has three parliamentary seats.
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