Sri Lanka’s election commission on Sunday formally announced that Marxist leader Anura Kumara Dissanayake won the presidential election, defeating incumbent Ranil Wickremesinghe.
The commission said on its website that Mr. Dissanayake, 55, won the presidency with 42.31% of votes in Saturday’s election, pushing opposition leader Sajith Premadasa to second place and Wickremesinghe to a distant third.
Mr. Dissanayake will be sworn in as the new President of Sri Lanka on Monday.
Who is Anura Kumara Dissanayake?
Mr. Dissanayake, popularly known by his initials “AKD”, had entered leftist politics in his student days.
It was the youngster’s hostility to the state and ruling class that led him to the student wing of the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP of People’s Liberation Front), a party of Marxist-Leninist origins.
He grew up in a small farmer household that was not politically active. His father was an office aide in the government Survey Department and his mother was a homemaker.
