Mr. Rajapaksa, a former defense chief and
brother of an ex-president, vowed to bring stability to a country still reeling
from attacks on Easter Sunday.
By
Dharisha Bastians and Kai Schultz
 |
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Gotabaya
Rajapaksa declared victory on Sunday in Sri Lanka’s presidential election,
after
a campaign centered on security and stability. Credit Eranga Jayawardena/
Associated
Press
|
COLOMBO,
Sri Lanka — Gotabaya
Rajapaksa declared victory on Sunday in Sri Lanka’s presidential election,
signaling the return to power of a divisive family credited for ending the
country’s long civil war through brutal means.
Mr. Rajapaksa defeated his closest opponent,
Sajith Premadasa, by about 10 percentage points, according to an official tally
from Sri Lanka’s election commission. His party expects him to be sworn into
office early this week.
“As we usher in a new journey for Sri Lanka,
we must remember that all Sri Lankans are part of this journey,” Mr. Rajapaksa
wrote on Twitter in his first remarks about the victory. “Let us rejoice
peacefully, with dignity and discipline in the same manner in which we
campaigned.”
During the election, Mr. Rajapaksa, 70, a
former wartime defense chief nicknamed “Terminator” by his family, capitalized
on public outrage at the current government’s mishandling of intelligence
reports warning of terrorist attacks in Sri Lanka, a lush island at the foot of
India. In April, a Muslim militant group claiming loyalty to the Islamic State
killed hundreds of people in coordinated suicide bombings at churches and
hotels on Easter Sunday.
The attacks shattered a fragile postwar peace
in Sri Lanka, where wounds still fester from the war with separatist ethnic
Tamils during which thousands of people died. In 2009, Mr. Rajapaksa and his
brother Mahinda Rajapaksa, then Sri Lanka’s president, ended that conflict, but
they stand accused of crimes against humanity, including directing the bombings
of civilian hospitals and torturing journalists.
During campaign speeches, Gotabaya Rajapaksa
vowed to take a tough stance on terrorism as president and to bring stability
to Sri Lanka, where a collapse in tourism after the bombings threw the economy
into a tailspin. Many Sri Lankans struggling to make ends meet support the
Rajapaksas in the hopes that they can revive the economy, which boomed toward
the end of their stretch in power.
Others worry that democracy and freedom of
speech will be curtailed under Mr. Rajapaksa, whose party, Sri Lanka Podujana
Peramuna, is likely to appoint Mahinda Rajapaksa as the new prime minister.
It is not the first time the former president
has sought the position. In October 2018, Sri Lanka’s departing president,
Maithripala Sirisena, abruptly fired Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe,
calling him inept and corrupt, and then appointing Mahinda Rajapaksa to the
position. Many considered the move a coup, and by the time the power grab was
ruled illegal, two protesters had been killed.
But the Easter Sunday bombings and struggling
economy were enough to allow another Rajapaksa to rise. Asanga Welikala, the
director of the Edinburgh Center for Constitutional Law and an expert on Sri
Lanka, said that Gotabaya Rajapaksa won this election by leveraging the same
hard-line approach to national security and “social discipline” that has
propelled populists to power around the world.
“This is a mandate that rejects reform,
democratization, civil freedom and broad tolerance of pluralism,” Mr. Welikala
said of the vote.
Mahinda Rajapaksa’s decade as president was
known for tightly centralized power and the spread of a strident Sinhalese
Buddhist nationalism that has inspired attacks against the country’s large
minority communities. Hostility toward Muslims, in particular, has risen since
the Easter Sunday attacks, heightening fears of retribution against innocent
Sri Lankans.
And although the economy grew under Mahinda
Rajapaksa, so did the country’s debt to China, whose influence in Sri Lankan
affairs spiked under the family’s watch. A lopsided dependence on China for
development projects was a key part of Mahinda Rajapaksa’s startling election defeat
in 2015.
Since then, the country was forced to give up
a port complex to China as the debt crisis battered the economy, though
analysts said Gotabaya Rajapaksa’s government would most likely tread carefully
with China this time around.
“Gota will play the China card, but Beijing
is now less inclined to repeat the large financial investments it did five or
10 years ago due to growing domestic opposition and international scrutiny,”
said Constantino Xavier, a foreign policy fellow at Brookings India in New
Delhi.
Officials said turnout on Saturday, when 16
million eligible voters chose among 35 candidates, was more than 80 percent,
and that Mr. Rajapaksa had won about 52 percent of the vote. The election was
largely peaceful, though some violence was reported, including an attack on
buses carrying Muslims to polling stations in northwest Sri Lanka. (There were
no reports of injuries.)
Gotabaya Rajapaksa’s chief competitor, Mr.
Premadasa, 52, whose father was killed during the war by a Tamil Tiger rebel,
did well with minority Muslims and Tamils in conflict-torn northern and eastern
provinces.
But Mr. Rajapaksa won big with a crucial
voting bloc: Sinhalese Buddhists who make up around 70 percent of the Sri
Lankan population and credit the Rajapaksa family for ending the war. Sunday
morning, Mr. Rajapaksa’s supporters hugged and cheered outside his home on the
outskirts of Colombo, the capital.
In a statement conceding defeat, Mr.
Premadasa, of the United National Front, congratulated Mr. Rajapaksa, urging
him to “strengthen and protect the democratic institutions and values that
enabled his peaceful election.”
Dharisha Bastians reported from Colombo, and
Kai Schultz from New Delhi.
