By Uditha Jayasinghe
COLOMBO (Reuters) – Namal Rajapaksa, the son of Sri Lanka’s former president, will run in the Sept. 21 presidential election, he said on Wednesday, taking on the incumbent, Ranil Wickremesinghe, whom many analysts see as the frontrunner.
Elected by parliament in July 2022, Wickremesinghe has shepherded the Indian Ocean nation through its worst financial crisis in decades, which triggered widespread protests that had forced his predecessor, Gotabaya Rajapaksa, to resign.
Namal Rajapaksa, a lawmaker in the 225-member parliament, is the eldest son of two-time president Mahinda Rajapaksa and a member of the Sri Lanka Podujana Peramuna (SLPP) party, founded by his uncle Basil, which has a parliamentary majority.
“My candidature was a last-minute decision but we are ready to work hard to activate grassroot level support,” he told Reuters by telephone.
Namal Rajapaksa also said he would hold talks with 92 parliamentarians who recently declared support for Wickremesinghe, splintering his uncle’s SLPP and severely limiting support for his candidature.
But Namal Rajapaksa’s candidacy will test whether his powerful family, which produced two presidents, has managed to retain its popularity despite Sri Lanka’s gruelling financial crisis.
Another uncle is former President Gotabaya Rajapaksa, who became Sri Lanka’s first head of state to resign, about halfway into the term since his 2019 election, in the fallout of the crisis, caused by a severe shortfall of foreign exchange.
Sri Lanka also defaulted on its foreign debt in May 2022 but has since signed a $10-billion restructuring deal with bilateral creditors and aims to finalise a $12.5-billion debt rework with bondholders, efforts Namal Rajapaksa said he would support.
Rajapaksa added that he would work to create jobs and help small businesses as the economy makes a fragile recovery, backed by a $2.9-billion bailout from the International Monetary Fund (IMF).
“We are studying the IMF programme to see how we can work around some of its requirements, such as government revenue increases … without increasing the burden on the public,” he said.
(Reporting by Uditha Jayasinghe; Editing by Clarence Fernandez)
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