The ruling party has nominated Namal Rajapaksa to challenge incumbent Ranil Wickremesinghe in the September 21 election.
The son of Sri Lanka’s former president Mahinda Rajapaksa is set to run in the country’s upcoming presidential election, which comes as the country grapples with its worst economic crisis in decades.
Namal Rajapaksa, 38, declared his candidacy for the Sri Lanka Podujana Peramuna (SLPP) party at a Buddhist ceremony in the capital Colombo on Wednesday.
He will face 75-year-old incumbent President Ranil Wickremesinghe, who many analysts see as the frontrunner in the September 21 election.
Wickremesinghe, who was elected by parliament in July 2022, has guided the Indian Ocean nation out of a financial crisis that sparked widespread protests over corruption and mismanagement that forced his predecessor and Namal’s uncle, Gotabaya Rajapaksa, to resign and flee the country.
“After careful consideration, the party has decided on Namal Rajapaksa as its presidential candidate,” SLPP secretary-general Sagara Kariyawasam said.
Namal, who served as sports minister during his father’s presidency which ended in January 2015, said he was forced to run under the circumstances as he was only expected to run in the 2029 election.
“Now I have to sit down and plan my campaign. This is something I did not expect,” Namal Rajapaksa told AFP after his candidacy was announced.
He put his name forward after the expected candidate, businesswoman Damica Perera, withdrew on Tuesday, citing “personal reasons”.
Namal said he wanted to be “his own character,” but he knew he would have to live with both the positive and negative legacy of his family’s rule.
“This is an issue that we will face not just in this election but for the rest of our lives,” he said.
Mahinda was credited with ending the Tamil separatist war in 2009, but it was widely claimed that the army killed up to 40,000 Tamil civilians in the final months of the fighting.
Testing in the financial crisis
Namal’s candidacy will be a test of whether his powerful family, which has produced two presidents, has been able to maintain popularity despite the country’s economic collapse.
Sri Lanka defaulted on $46 billion of its external debt in April 2022 after running out of foreign currency to pay for essential imports. It has since signed a $10 billion restructuring deal with its creditors and plans to finalize a $12.5 billion debt restructuring with creditors, which Namal has said he will support.
Wickremesinghe ran for president twice before and lost both times, but he has served as prime minister six times since entering parliament in 1977.
He is seeking a five-year term to enforce austerity measures, which he says are needed to bolster the cash-strapped country’s economic growth and start paying down its foreign debt.
Namal’s candidacy has turned the presidential polls into a race between four major candidates.
The other two candidates, Sajith Premadasa and Anura Kumara Dissanayake, have said they would continue to accept the $2.9 billion International Monetary Fund bailout that Wickremesinghe negotiated last year, but would cut taxes and halt privatizations.
Dissanayake, the leader of the Left party, also vowed to jail members of the Rajapaksa family and Wickremesinghe, who is accused of obstructing investigations into corruption while in power.
