Will next Sri Lanka President be India-friendly or pro-China? Top 5 contenders in fray

Sri Lankans began voting on Saturday to elect their 10th president. The final results of the elections are expected Sunday. This is the first election since the South Asian country plunged into an economic crisis in 2022.

Back then, the former Sri Lankan President, Gotabaya Rajapaksa, fled the nation after an economic crisis led to political chaos in the country. Ranil Wickremesinghe subsequently took over as the acting President. Wickremesinghe has been in office for two years now.

India-Sri Lanka-China ties

Sri Lanka has been of utmost importance to both India and China. China is one of the largest bilateral creditor to the country. India, too, promised long-term investments in Sri Lanka and helped the island nation at the time of the crisis.

Meanwhile, "Sri Lanka is increasingly caught in a geopolitical tug-of-war between India and China in the Indian Ocean as the two powers seek strategic and mineral resources," the East Asia Forum said in a latest report.

China's influence on the Sri Lanka, an island nation lying in the Indian Ocean, may raise concerns for neighbouring India. "China has significantly expanded its engagements in the Indian Ocean region over the past three decades, raising fears among American and Indian strategists that its growing naval presence, together with its use of so-called “debt-trap diplomacy,” might provide it with meaningful military advantages far from its shores," Brookings, a research think tank, had said in on eof its reports.

Who is likely to be the next Sri Lanka President?

There are 38 candidates in the fray. According to the Associated Press, it is largely a three-way contest between incumbent President Ranil Wickremesinghe, Marxist-leaning lawmaker Anura Kumara Dissanayake, and opposition leader Sajith Premadasa.

An opinion poll had earlier showed Dissanayake leading in voting preferences at 36 percent, followed by main opposition leader Sajith Premadasa and President Ranil Wickremesinghe at third, Reuters reported.

1. Ranil Wickremesinghe: He is a six-time prime minister of Sri Lanka. Days after taking over as an acting president, he was officially elected as the President by a parliamentary vote in July 2022 to cover the remainder of Rajapaksa’s five-year term. Now, Wickremesinghe is seeking another term to strengthen the gains.

The 75-year-old has been affiliated with the centre-right United National Party (UNP). He, however, is running for the top job as an independent candidate, AlJaZeera reported. Many people accuse him of protecting members of the Rajapaksa family, whom they blame for the economic crisis.

India vs China?: Wickremesinghe sees India as friendly nation. In an interview with the Print, Wickremesinghe said he looks after the interest of Sri Lanka which includes ensuring that we do not allow any harm to India's national security. "That has been our policy since 1987...we are committed to that," he added.

2. Anura Kumara Dissanayake: He is a member of Marxist party Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP), which emerged in popularity after the 2022 crisis. According to Reuters, his leftist policies to help the poor and stirring speeches have made him a leading candidate in Sri Lanka's presidential election on Saturday. He is popularly known as AKD.

Dissanayake's Janatha Vimukthi Peremuna (JVP) party has three seats in parliament. He is running as candidate for the National People's Power (NPP) alliance, which includes his Marxist-leaning JVP party that has traditionally backed stronger state intervention and more closed market economic policies.

India vs China? It's feared that Dissanayake will be pro-China, keeping in view his Marxist, Leninist leanings in the past. However, Professor Anil Jayantha, one of the national executive committee members of NPP told The Week, "Our party or our leader wants to engage with India. India is certainly our neighbour and a superpower. Recently, we were invited by India for an agricultural summit. We visited Delhi and Kerala. Our leader wants to deal with all the major powers to stabilise the Sri Lankan economy.”

3. Sajith Premadasa: He is the son of former President Ranasinghe Premadasa, who was assassinated in office. Premadasa, 57, studied at the London School of Economics and entered politics after his father was killed in a suicide bombing during a May Day rally in 1993.

The Sri Lanka Opinion Tracker Survey by Institute for Health Policy (IHP) showed Premadasa coming in second in voting preferences at 32 percent, trailing Dissanayake at 36 percent, followed by Wickremesinghe who is third with 28 percent.

Premadasa is popular among the island's Tamil and Muslim minorities. Premadasa favours a mix of interventionist and free-market economic policies and currently leads the Samagi Jana Balawegaya (SJB) party that broke with President Ranil Wickremesinghe's United National Party (UNP) in 2020.

India vs China? Premadasa is said to have been favouring India. "I am a strong advocate of a permanent seat for India in the UN Security Council,” Premadasa had said in an exclusive interview to The Week.

4. Namal Rajapaksa: He is the eldest son of two-time president Mahinda Rajapaksa. At 38, the Sri Lanka Podujana Peramuna (SLPP) party leader is the youngest candidate in the fray.

However, support for the Rajapaksa family is at its lowest due to the economic havoc of 2022. He also served as the minister of youth and sports under his uncle's presidency between 2020 and 2022.

In the Sri Lanka Opinion Tracker Survey by the Institute for Health Policy (IHP), Namal Rajapaksa trails far behind at 5 percent.

India vs China? It was widely believed that Rajapaksa’s government was shifting to China, given the vast Chinese investments in the island nation. However, Namal Rajapaksa had said in 2017 that India misinterpreted the Rajapaksa administration’s relationship with China.

"We always made sure that Sri Lankan soil or waters was not used against any other country. And we maintained that during my father’s time on a strict basis,” he told The Hindu in an interview in 2017.

5. Nuwan Bopage: The candidate of the Peoples' Struggle Alliance, Bopage hopes to tap into the remnants of the massive people's uprising that deposed Gotabaya Rajapaksa two years back. He has taken a strong anti-corruption stance, backs more pro-poor policies and opposes Sri Lanka's alignment with the IMF programme.

Sri Lanka's voting system

Sri Lanka's system allows voters to cast three preferential votes for their chosen candidates. The candidate securing 50 percent of the votes or more is declared winner. If no candidate wins 50 percent in the first round, then preferential votes are tallied for the top two candidates to determine the winner.

A total of 39 people are contesting the vote, including one 79-year-old candidate who remains on the ballot despite dying of a heart attack last month.