Huge election wins by a new left-leaning president and his party have changed Sri Lanka’s political landscape – but the cash-strapped island’s new rulers are quickly realising that campaign promises are easier to make than to keep.
Anura Kumara Dissanayake’s remarkable victory in the presidential election in September was swiftly followed by a landslide for his National People’s Power (NPP) alliance in parliamentary elections.
As a new year starts, he and his supporters want this to be a turning point for the country, which is trying to recover from devastating economic crisis and years of misrule.
However, they have limited room for manoeuvre to make good on pledges to voters, whose expectations from the new government are high.
Since the financial meltdown of 2022, economic recovery has been fragile and Sri Lanka is far from out of the woods.
The NPP won 159 seats in the 225-member assembly in November – an unprecedented two-thirds majority – giving Dissanayake a sweeping mandate to push through major economic and constitutional reforms.
However, even as the results were coming in, the new president had to gear up for a meeting with a visiting delegation from the International Monetary Fund (IMF), with which the outgoing government had negotiated a $2.9bn (£2.31bn) bailout package.
The IMF deal became controversial as it led to severe austerity measures, tax rises and cuts in energy subsidies – hitting common people hard.
During the campaign Dissanayake and his alliance promised that they would re-negotiate parts of the IMF agreement.
But in his address to the new parliament, he performed a U-turn.
“The economy is in such a state that it cannot take the slightest shock… There’s no room to make mistakes,” Dissanayake said.
“This is not the time to discuss if the terms [of the IMF loan] are good or bad, if the agreement is favourable to us or not… The process had taken about two years, and we cannot start all over again.”