Sri Lanka parties busy forming alliances to face November parliamentary poll

Colombo: All major political parties in Sri Lanka are shortlisting candidates and attempting to forge new alliances as the country prepares for the November 14 parliamentary election.

No major party has yet submitted their nominations to contest any of the 22 electoral districts despite the opening of the nominations last Friday.

The nominations for the election will close on October 11.

The ruling National People’s Power (NPP) party, which won the September 21 presidential election, said it is in the process of finalising its candidates list.

“We have already changed the political culture with our governance so far during the last two weeks, we will continue the good work after the parliamentary election with new faces," Samantha Vidyaratne, an NPP leader said.

Former president Ranil Wickremesinghe’s United National Party (UNP), the grand old party in the country, had unsuccessfully tried to merge with its offshoot Samagi Jana Balawegaya (SJB) party to face the election.

Wickremesinghe finished third behind the SJB leader Sajith Premadasa in the presidential election.

The split votes between Premadasa and Wickremesinghe, who together polled 50.03 per cent, helped incumbent Anura Dissanayake to win the presidential poll. The UNP is in the process of finalising an election pact with groups which had broken away from the Rajapaksa family-dominated Sri Lanka Podujana Peramuna (SLPP) party to contest under the cooking gas cylinder symbol which Wickremesinghe used during his presidential bid.

“We will contest most districts under the gas cylinder symbol with one or two districts under UNP’s elephant symbol," the party chair Vajira Abeywardena said.

Meanwhile, Tamil political groups said they were too trying to forge alliances.

Dissanayake, the leader of the Marxist Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna party's broader front, the National People’s Power (NPP), as sworn in as Sri Lanka's ninth president on September 23.

On September 24, he dissolved the 225-member parliament in which the NPP had just three seats.

The last general election in Sri Lanka, where MPs are elected for a five-year term, took place in August 2020.