Former Sri Lankan president Mahinda Rajapaksa has hailed his brother Gotabaya’s victory in the island’s presidential elections and said it was a defeat of the ‘“2015 style attempt to […] to purloin the mandate of the people through backroom deals with various chauvinistic ethnic and religious groupings organised through narrow political agendas.”
“The time has now come to put an end to this dangerous game of promoting religious and ethnic chauvinism for political purposes,” Mahinda further said in a statement today.
Gotabaya Rajapaksa won the election with over a million votes more than rival Sajith Premadasa. While sweeping Sinhala votes in the South, Rajapaksa averaged less than 18% of the vote in the Tamil homeland of the North-East. In Jaffna he obtained only 6.24% of the district’s votes.
Mahinda also claimed in the statement that they would be “initiating a programme of action to deliver justice to all those who have been subject to persecution and harassment by this government over the past five years.”
