By Amal Jayasinghe

COLOMBO – Sri Lanka’s ruling party nominated a scion of the controversial Rajapaksa family Wednesday (7) to challenge the incumbent president in next month’s polls, the first since the country’s unprecedented economic meltdown.

The Sri Lanka Podujana Peramuna (SLPP) party named Namal Rajapaksa, 38, as its candidate in the September 21 election at a Buddhist ceremony at their party office in the capital Colombo.

“After careful consideration, the party decided to make Namal Rajapaksa our presidential candidate,” SLPP Secretary Sagara Kariyawasam said.

Namal, a former sports minister under his father Mahinda Rajapaksa’s presidency, which ended in January 2015, said circumstances forced him into the fray.

His uncle, Gotabaya, also won the presidency in November 2019 but was forced to resign and flee the country in 2022 following months of protests over corruption and mismanagement.

It was widely expected that the 38-year-old Namal would run only at the 2029 presidential polls because of the lasting impact of the country’s economic ruin under Gotabaya.

“Now we have to sit and plan the campaign because this is something that I didn’t expect,” Namal Rajapaksa told AFP shortly after the formal announcement of his candidacy.

He put his name forward after the expected candidate, businessman Dhammika Perera, dropped out on Tuesday citing “personal reasons”.

Namal said he wanted to be “my own character”, but was aware that he would have to live with both the positive and negative legacies of his family’s rule.

“That is something that I will face throughout my life, not only this election,” he said.

“I will present my own case. I will take the best out of my instinct and my father’s policies.”

Mahinda is credited with ending Sri Lanka’s Tamil separatist war in 2009 – but which also sparked allegations that troops killed up to 40,000 Tamil civilians in the final months of fighting.

The entry of a Rajapaksa into the presidential race formalized a widening split in the government.

A majority of legislators from the SLPP had wanted the party to back their new ally, President Ranil Wickremesinghe, after praising him for turning the economy around after the 2022 crisis.

Wickremesinghe is not from the SLPP, but he had the party’s backing to replace then-president Gotabaya Rajapaksa.

Despite the downfall of Gotabaya, the SLPP enjoyed a majority in the 225-member parliament, controlled the government – and had supported Wickremesinghe.

However, the parting of ways began when the election was called last month.

That revealed the divisions in the once-dominant SLPP, a nationalist party appealing to the Sinhala-Buddhist majority.

Namal’s entry turns the presidential poll into a battle among four main candidates.

Wickremesinghe had contested two presidential elections and lost both. However, he had been prime minister six times since entering parliament in 1977.

He is seeking a full five-year term to press ahead with his austerity measures, which he says are necessary to shore up the reserves of the cash-strapped nation and start repaying its external loans.

Sri Lanka defaulted on its $46 billion foreign debt in April 2022 when it ran out of foreign exchange for essential imports.

Two other front-runner candidates – Sajith Premadasa and Anura Kumara Dissanayake – say they will continue with the $2.9 billion IMF bailout negotiated by Wickremesinghe last year, but will reduce taxes and halt privatization.

Dissanayake, leader of a leftist party, is also vowing to jail members of the Rajapaksa family, as well as Wickremesinghe, who is accused of blocking investigations into corruption during their time in power.

-Agence France-Presse