Sri Lanka’s president-elect Maithripala Sirisena has engineered enough defections from his predecessor’s party to secure the parliamentary majority essential for radical constitutional reforms, officials said yesterday.
Sirisena has received the backing of more than 40 lawmakers who were previously loyal to Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa, spokesman Rajitha Senaratne said.
“We now have more than we need in parliament,” Senaratne told reporters. “We can have our legislative program approved without any difficulty whatsoever.”
Sirisena, who was scheduled to address the nation yesterday from the historic hill city of Kandy, previously had the backing of 89 lawmakers and needed another 24 to secure a simple majority in the 225-member house.
The new leader, who is himself a defector from Rajapaksa’s party, has already pledged to reverse many of the constitutional changes brought in by his predecessor which gave huge powers to the president.
Sirisena wants to establish independent commissions to run the police, the public service and the judiciary and transfer much of his executive powers to parliament.
Rajapakse’s Sri Lankan Freedom Party has said it would support Sirisena’s constitutional reforms, making their enactment a formality.
Sirisena quit Rajapaksa’s Cabinet in November to emerge as an opposition unity candidate in Thursday’s polls, triggering the biggest defection of lawmakers from a Sri Lankan government since independence from the UK in 1948.
In his speech in Kandy, Sirisena is expected to spell out his reform plan in detail and call for a normalizing of relations with the EU as well as other Western nations and India.
Rajapaksa had alienated many of his fellow leaders by refusing to allow an international probe into allegations of mass civilian casualties in the brutal finale to Sri Lanka’s 37-year civil war in 2009.
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