Lagatar24 Desk
Colombo, May 13: Sri Lanka’s new prime minister will start forming a unity government today, but his appointment has failed to pacify anti-government protestors who have demanded the president’s resignation over the country’s dire economic crisis.
After a week of violent clashes that left nine people dead and over 300 injured, President Gotabaya Rajapaksa named veteran opposition politician Ranil Wickremesinghe as the island nation’s prime minister late on Thursday.
As the violence escalated, the president’s elder brother, Mahinda Rajapaksa, resigned as prime minister and is sheltering in a military post.
PM Wickremesinghe is the country’s only MP from his United National Party, hence forming a government will be dependent on rival political groups. The Rajapaksas’ alliance controls around 100 of the 225 seats in parliament, while the opposition has 58. The rest are self-contained.
Protesters claim that the selection of PM Wickremesinghe will do little to quell public outrage at the president, whom they blame for the country’s worst economic crisis since independence in 1948.
Sri Lanka is critically low on foreign cash, buffeted by the epidemic, rising oil prices, and populist tax cuts by the Gotabaya brothers, and widespread inflation and gasoline shortages have led thousands to the streets in a month of mostly peaceful protests until this week.
