Sri Lankan President Maithripala Sirisena on Friday dissolved Parliament and called for fresh elections amid a deepening political crisis.
The government printer published a notification signed by Sirisena announcing the dissolution of Parliament effective at midnight on Friday.
The notice says that the names of candidates for new elections would be called before Nov. 26, and that the election would be held on Jan. 5. The new Parliament is to be convened on Jan. 17.
Photo: EPA-EFE
Sri Lanka has been in a political crisis since Oct. 26, when Sirisena fired his prime minister, Ranil Wickremesinghe, and replaced him with former strongman Mahinda Rajapaksa.
Wickremesinghe has said his firing was unconstitutional and refused to vacate his official residence, demanding that Parliament be immediately summoned to prove that he has support among its members.
Sirisena had suspended Parliament for two weeks in a move that Wickremesinghe’s backers have said was designed to buy time to shore up support.
There were calls locally and internationally to convene Parliament to end the impasse.
Amid the pressure, Sirisena announced that Parliament would be summoned on Nov.14. He maintained that his choice for prime minister, Mahinda Rajapaksa, had a majority in Parliament.
However, the decision to dissolve Parliament is a sign that this is not so, observers say.
“The dissolution clearly indicates that Mr Sirisena has grossly misjudged and miscalculated the support that he might or could secure to demonstrate support in the Parliament,” said Bharath Gopalaswamy, director at the South Asia Center of the Atlantic Council, a New Delhi-based analyst group.
“At the end of the day, he is a victim of his own homegrown crisis,” Gopalaswamy said.
Wickremesinghe’s camp is likely to contest Sirisena’s move because of constitutional provisions stating that a parliament cannot be dissolved until four-and-a-half years after its inception. The current Parliament was elected in August 2015.
“It’s totally unconstitutional,” said Harsha de Silva, a member of Wickremesinghe’s United National Party and a former minister.
“Sirisena has relegated the constitution to toilet paper. We will fight this dictator to the end,” De Silva added.
The party said on Twitter that it would meet with the elections commissioner to discuss the constitutionality of Sirisena’s move.
Earlier, US Representative Eliot Engel, the top-ranking Democrat on the US House Committee on Foreign Affairs, and two other lawmakers wrote to Sirisena expressing grave concern over the country’s political developments.
They said actions circumventing the democratic process could affect US assistance — including a planned five-year aid package worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
“We fear that recent actions, if not corrected, will threaten your country’s democratic development and derail the progress made in recent years,” the three lawmakers said in a letter.
Hours before the dissolution, Rajapaksa indicated in a speech what was coming, saying that the government must go to the people for confirmation on whether Sirisena made the correct decision when he appointed him as prime minister.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
China would train thousands of foreign law enforcement officers to see the world order “develop in a more fair, reasonable and efficient direction,” its minister for public security has said. “We will [also] send police consultants to countries in need to conduct training to help them quickly and effectively improve their law enforcement capabilities,” Chinese Minister of Public Security Wang Xiaohong (王小洪) told an annual global security forum. Wang made the announcement in the eastern city of Lianyungang on Monday in front of law enforcement representatives from 122 countries, regions and international organizations such as Interpol. The forum is part of ongoing