Turnout low at Sri Lanka Parliamentary Elections: US media
April 8, 2010 10:26 pm
Three months after winning re-election in a landslide,
Candidates and election monitors said that voter turnout appeared to be unusually low, especially given the circumstances: the country was holding its first parliamentary elections since the Tamil Tiger insurgency was defeated in May 2009.
Mr. Rajapaksa was hoping to consolidate his presidential victory with a solid majority in Parliament. He has pledged to take firm steps to unite this ethnically divided and war-ravaged nation once the election is over.
But opposition parties accuse him of seeking to turn
Mr. Rajapaksa’s main opponent in the presidential contest, the retired army general Sarath Fonseka, is under arrest and in the midst of a court martial, accused of using his military post to advance his political career. Government officials say that he was plotting a coup. General Fonseka’s supporters say that the charges against him were brought to punish him for running against his onetime ally.
Mr. Rajapaksa won the January election handily with 58 percent of the vote, against General Fonseka’s 40 percent.
The unwieldy coalition of opposition parties that had united behind General Fonseka went their separate ways for the parliamentary election, and most are in disarray. The best they could hope for, analysts said, was to prevent Mr. Rajapaksa’s party from winning a sweeping majority that would allow it to rewrite the Constitution.
“It is a low-turnout poll,” said Ravi Karunanayake, a candidate of the main opposition party, the United National Party. “Low turnout is likely to turn out to our advantage.”
Paikiasothy Saravanamuttu, director of the Center for Policy Alternatives, said the low turnout was most likely a sign of voters’ apathy.
“It is a paradoxical election,” Mr. Saravanamuttu said. “There are 7,600 candidates, but they don’t seem to have enthused their fellow citizens.”
Mr. Rajapaksa, who was first elected in 2005 after promising to defeat the Tigers, has pledged to use a large parliamentary majority to take measures to unify the country, which is split along religious and ethnic lines among the Sinhalese Buddhist majority; the minority Tamils, most of whom are Hindu; and a small Muslim population.
The Tamil Tiger insurgency sought a separate homeland in
northern