Sri Lanka's president was struggling to cobble together a coalition yesterday in a hung parliament where monks, Marxists and militants will call the shots, potentially at the expense of the country's fragile peace process.
President Chandrika Kumaratunga's leftist Freedom Alliance won 105 seats in the 225-member assembly in Friday's election, but was looking for at least another eight seats to give it an absolute majority, party officials said.
A spokesman said party senior and leader of the opposition in the outgoing parliament Mahinda Rajapakse held hectic talks with a party of Buddhist monks to secure the support of their nine seats.
"So far there has been no breakthrough," sources close to Rajapakse told reporters.
Analysts and diplomats expressed fears that a weak government coupled with a highly militant parliament could further undermine the already faltering attempts to reach a permanent solution to Sri Lanka's ethnic bloodshed.
"I don't think you could ask for a more militant parliament in Sri Lanka than this," one Asian diplomat said. "Looks like we are losing the middle ground here. It would be a challenge to get anything done in this new house."
Rajapakse, who is a front-runner to become prime minister in a new government, was also trying to secure the support of two other minority parties -- the Tamil Ceylon Workers Congress and the Muslim Sri Lanka Muslim Congress.
Press reports here said Kumaratunga was likely to invite a member from her own party yesterday to be sworn in as prime minister and then form a government offering positions to potential coalition partners.
Her former foreign minister Lakshman Kadirgamar, a man who is credited with getting an international ban on Tamil Tiger rebels, is also tipped to be the next premier, press reports here said yesterday.
Kumaratunga, who can remain president until December next year, led the campaign in the run-up to Friday's vote seeking a mandate for "continuity with change."
There were no immediate signs that any of the smaller parties were willing to join Kumaratunga's Freedom Alliance, which has a strong contingent of Marxists who are heavily critical of concessions to Tamil rebels.
Proxies of the Tamil Tigers, the Tamil National Alliance, said they would provide support to any future government that recognizes them as the "sole representatives" of the Tamil minority and accept their plan to devolve power.
The Tiger guerrillas in November unveiled their blueprint for peace in the form of establishing an "Interim Self-Governing Authority" in war-torn areas, but Kumaratunga's party has already rejected it, arguing it was a stepping stone to a separate state.
Sri Lanka's 13th parliament since independence from Britain in 1948 will be one of its most ethnically and religiously polarized when it holds its first session on April 22.
The Tiger proxies won 22 seats to become the third largest group while the radical nationalist all-clergy National Heritage Party saw nine of its monks elected to parliament.
The monks staunchly oppose the Tigers, whose three-decade campaign to set up a Tamil homeland has claimed more than 60,000 lives.
The monks have made it clear they would neither support nor help bring down a government, but also hinted that they would be in the running for the post of speaker in the assembly.
"People have voted for us not to align ourselves with any of the two main parties," monk legislator-elect Athuraliya Ratana said.
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