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COLOMBO: Cash-strapped Sri Lanka voted for its next president Saturday in an effective referendum on an unpopular International Monetary Fund austerity plan enacted after the island nation’s unprecedented financial crisis.
Turnout was at nearly 70 percent an hour before polling stations closed at 4:00 p.m. (1030 GMT), an election commission official said, citing provisional figures.
The record for voter turnout in a Sri Lankan presidential election was set in 2019 with 83.72 percent.
President Ranil Wickremesinghe is fighting an uphill battle for a fresh mandate to continue belt-tightening measures that stabilized the economy and ended months of food, fuel and medicine shortages.
His two years in office restored calm to the streets after civil unrest spurred by the downturn in 2022 saw thousands storm the compound of his predecessor, who promptly fled the country.
“I’ve taken this country out of bankruptcy,” Wickremesinghe, 75, said after casting his ballot.
“I will now deliver Sri Lanka a developed economy, developed social system and developed political system.”
But Wickremesinghe’s tax hikes and other measures, imposed under the terms of a $2.9 billion IMF bailout, have left millions struggling to make ends meet.
“The country has been through a lot,” lawyer and musician Soundarie David Rodrigo told AFP after casting her vote in Colombo.
“So I just don’t want to see another upheaval coming soon.”
Wickremesinghe is tipped to lose to one of two formidable challengers. One is Anura Kumara Dissanayaka, the leader of a once-marginal Marxist party tarnished by its violent past.
The party led two failed uprisings in the 1970s and 1980s that left more than 80,000 people dead, and it won less than four percent of the vote in the previous parliamentary elections.
But Sri Lanka’s crisis has proven an opportunity for the 55-year-old Dissanayaka, who has seen a surge of support based on his pledge to change the island’s “corrupt” political culture.
He said at a polling station he was confident of securing the top job.
“After the victory there should be no clashes, no violence,” he said. “Our country needs a new political culture.”
Fellow opposition leader Sajith Premadasa, 57, the son of a former president assassinated in 1993 during the country’s decades-long civil war, is also expected to make a strong showing.
Premadasa has vowed to fight endemic corruption, and both he and Dissanayaka have pledged to renegotiate the terms of the IMF rescue package.
Political analyst Kusal Perera told AFP it was difficult to predict a winner from the three-way race — the first in the island’s history.
“What is clear is that no candidate will surpass the 50 percent mark” needed to win outright, he said.
Officials would then carry out a count of second- and third-preference votes to determine the winner.
More than 17 million people were eligible to vote in the election, with more than 63,000 police deployed to guard polling booths and counting centers in schools and temples.
The government also banned the sale of liquor over the weekend and said no victory rallies or celebrations would be permitted until a week after the results were announced.
“This election would go down in the history of the country as the most peaceful,” election commission chair R.M.A.L. Ratnayake told reporters in Colombo.
Counting began on Saturday evening and a result is expected on Sunday, but an official outcome could be delayed if the contest is close.
Schools were closed on Friday to be converted into polling stations, which were staffed by more than 200,000 public servants deployed to conduct the vote.
Economic issues dominated the eight-week campaign, with public anger widespread over the hardships endured since the peak of the crisis two years ago.
Official data showed that Sri Lanka’s poverty rate doubled to 25 percent between 2021 and 2022, adding more than 2.5 million people to those already living on less than $3.65 a day.
Experts warn that Sri Lanka’s economy is still vulnerable, with payments on the island’s $46 billion foreign debt yet to resume since a 2022 government default.
The IMF said reforms enacted by Wickremesinghe’s government were beginning to pay off, with growth slowly returning.
“A lot of progress has been made,” the IMF’s Julie Kozack told reporters in Washington last week.
“But the country is not out of the woods yet.”
Voter Rodrigo agreed.
“We have a lot of challenges ahead so good luck to whoever comes,” she told AFP.

NEW DELHI: Protesting junior doctors in the eastern Indian state of West Bengal returned to duty on Saturday to provide emergency services to flood victims, as they partially withdrew from a month-long strike over the rape and murder of a female colleague in Kolkata.
The 31-year-old trainee doctor was brutally raped and murdered on Aug. 9 at a state-run hospital in West Bengal’s capital, where she worked.
The murder has triggered daily protests across India, especially in Kolkata, where thousands of young medics called for safer working conditions.
They continued their protest despite the Supreme Court ordering them last week to return to work, and said they would only follow if their demands for justice for the victim and better safety measures in hospitals were met.
“The strike is partially over. We have partially joined the duty, the emergency duty. We have only started, not the regular duties, because our demands have been partially fulfilled,” Dr. Anustup Mukherjee, member of the West Bengal Junior Doctors’ Front, which represents some 7,000 physicians in the state, told Arab News.
Heeding to the doctors’ demands, West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee sacked on Tuesday Kolkata’s police chief and two top health ministry officials. But the demands for accountability for the murder and better security remain to be met.
“The demand for justice is still to be fulfilled, the demand for the eradication of the threat culture is yet to be fulfilled, even in the security and safety security issues, infrastructural issues are only partially fulfilled,” Mukherjee said, adding that the state’s administration told them it had ordered CCTVs, panic buttons and would arrange separate restrooms and bathrooms for on-duty doctors.
“We have got confirmation from the State Secretariat that our infrastructural demands for safety and security will be fulfilled ... But we are waiting.”
The doctors’ strike was lifted only at hospitals due to the ongoing floods in the state.
“We thought that a large number of people were suffering due to the flood, so we thought that ... a humanitarian decision should be taken,” Mukherjee said.
Dr. Ashfaqullah Naya, also a member of the West Bengal Junior Doctors’ Front, told Arab News that the protest was not over.
“This partial withdrawal is also because there is a flood in some parts of the state. But the protests in medical colleges will continue. We are just doing essential services, not the regular services,” he said.
As the probe into the gruesome murder has been moved from Kolkata Police to India’s federal Central Bureau of Investigation, doctors were waiting for all the perpetrators to be caught.
One man has been charged with the murder and was arrested last month, but following an autopsy, doctors assessing the report suggested the victim might have been subject to gang rape.
“The culprits should be caught,” Naya said. “Some of the culprits are roaming free.”
Last week, the CBI arrested the former principal of the college where the murder took place and a local police officer on charges of mishandling and tampering with key evidence in the case, and misleading the investigation team.