Lankans vote for a President to steer nation post 2022 collapse

Cash-strapped Sri Lanka voted for its next president Saturday in an effective referendum on an unpopular IMF austerity plan enacted after the nation's unprecedented financial crisis. Turnout was nearly 70% an hour before polling stations shut at 1030 GMT, an election commission official said, citing provisional figures.

The record for voter turnout in a Sri Lankan presidential election was set in 2019 with 83.72%. President Ranil Wickremesinghe is fighting an uphill battle for a fresh mandate to continue belt-tightening measures that stabilised the economy and ended months of food, fuel and medicine shortages.

His two years in office restored calm to the streets after civil unrest spurred by the downturn in 2022 saw thousands storm the compound of his predecessor, who promptly fled the country. "I've taken this country out of bankruptcy," Wickremesinghe, 75, said after casting his ballot. "I will now deliver Sri Lanka a developed economy, developed social system and developed political system."


But Wickremesinghe's tax hikes and other measures, imposed under the terms of a $2.9-billion International Monetary Fund (IMF) bailout, have left millions struggling to make ends meet.

"The country has been through a lot," lawyer and musician Soundarie David Rodrigo told AFP after casting her vote in Colombo.

"So I just don't want to see another upheaval coming soon."

Wickremesinghe is tipped to lose to one of two formidable challengers. One is Anura Kumara Dissanayaka, the leader of a once-marginal Marxist party tarnished by its violent past. The party led two failed uprisings in the 1970s and 1980s that left more than 80,000 people dead, and it won less than four% of the vote in the previous parliamentary elections.

But Sri Lanka's crisis has proven an opportunity for the 55-year-old Dissanayaka, who has seen a surge of support based on his pledge to change the island's "corrupt" political culture.

Fellow opposition leader Sajith Premadasa, 57, the son of a former president assassinated in 1993 during the country's decades-long civil war, is also expected to make a strong showing.