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Sri Lanka : Chandrika plans snap parliamentary election |
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Sri Lanka may well be heading for snap parliamentary elections after President Chandrika Kumaratunga’s failure to win a strong enough mandate in this month’s presidential poll to press ahead with her peace proposals. The main Opposition Untied National Party (UNP), whose support in parliament is crucial for Kumaratunga to implement her proposals to restore peace in the Indian Ocean island torn by ethnic violence, is unlikely to lend her that support.
Even before going in for the presidential elections, Kumaratunga had hinted that she could go for a snap parliamentary polls no sooner the presidential election was concluded. Mrs. Kumaratunga won 51 per cent at the December 21 election, down from the record 62 per cent she won in November 1994. The ruling party has only a one-seat majority in the 225-member Legislative Assembly and lacks the mandatory two thirds majority to make sweeping constitutional reforms promised by President Kumaratunga.
President Kumaratunga in her swearing in speech after defeating the UNP candidate Mr. Ranil Wickremesinghe had asked the Opposition leader to join in a new bid to end the 16-year war that has claimed thousands of lives. She extended him an offer to join the government. According to a newspaper, Sunday Leader, closed to the UNP, several senior party leaders seemed in favour of the UNP leader accepting Kumaratunga’s offer on the basis of an agreed agenda. But after a meeting of the parties executive committee on Dec. 28, the UNP rejected the offer to join in a national government.
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