Colombo,
\nAfter its electoral debacle in local council elections, Sri Lankan Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe’s United National Party has been plunged into a crisis with the premier facing pressure to give up the party leadership, UNP sources said.<\/p>\n
This was following a reported request by President Maithripala Sirisena to the UNP leader to step down as premier.<\/p>\n
Party sources said Wickremesinghe has come under pressure from within the party to handover the party leadership to someone else.<\/p>\n
Former president Mahinda Rajapaksa’s new party Sri Lanka People’s Party defeated Sirisena’s Sri Lanka Freedom Party and the UNP, winning 225 councils or two-thirds of the 340 councils that went to the polls on Saturday.<\/p>\n
The UNP won only 41 councils while the SLFP was a distant third with just 11 in the first electoral test of the unity government headed by Sirisena.<\/p>\n
Rajapaksa’s SLPP swept the polls in a massive wave of support to the former strongman.<\/p>\n
Sirisena’s SLFP suffered its worst drubbing with just 13 per cent of the vote.<\/p>\n
UNP sources said Sirisena’s request to Wickremesinghe to step down was unfair given that the president’s party had fared much worse.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, a media report said the UNP, the majority party in parliament, is close to a decision on forming a government on its own, ending the coalition arrangement.<\/p>\n
A UNP minister said following the discussion with Sirisena on Monday, senior UNP members met at Finance Minister Mangala Samaraweera’s house last night and discussed forming a UNP government at length, the Colombo Page reported.<\/p>\n
According sources, no decision was taken at the meeting to remove Wickremesinghe as prime minister. The UNP said it reserved the right to take any decision on the premier’s future.<\/p>\n
“We will form our own government independent of the president’s party,” a UNP backbencher said.<\/p>\n
The next parliamentary election is due only in August 2020,and the current government’s term will run until then.<\/p>\n
The UNP said their policies could not be implemented without hindrance as Sirisena’s SLFP was blocking them at every move. The UNP has 106 seats in the 225-member parliament, seven short of a working majority.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Colombo, After its electoral debacle in local council elections, Sri Lankan Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe’s United National Party has been plunged into a crisis with the premier facing pressure to give up the party leadership, UNP sources said. This was following a reported request by President Maithripala Sirisena to the UNP leader to step down […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":21877,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[87],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-21876","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21876","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21876"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21876\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21878,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21876\/revisions\/21878"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/21877"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21876"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21876"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21876"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}