Presidential election in Sri Lanka in 1994

The 1994 presidential election in Sri Lanka took place on November 9, 1994. It was the third presidential election since the presidential system was introduced in Sri Lanka . The election was won by the Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP) candidate Chandrika Kumaratunga . With this, the United National Party (UNP) also lost the presidency, which it held for 17 years after losing the general election a few months earlier .

prehistory

Chandrika Kumaratunga , the People's Alliance candidate

Gamini Dissanayake was the UNP's top candidate. He was the victim of an LTTE bombing on October 24, 1994, two weeks before the election date.

Since the introduction of the new constitution in 1978, Sri Lanka has had a presidential system based on the French and American models. The directly elected president had significant executive powers and appointed the prime minister and the respective government. In 1978 Junius Richard Jayewardene (United National Party, UNP) was elected first president and re-elected in the 1982 presidential election. Under his government, the ethnic differences between the Sinhalese majority population and the Tamil minority continued to intensify and finally culminated in open civil war from 1983 . The government lost control of large areas of the northern and eastern provinces where the Tamil rebels were active. In order to continue to use the large majority of the UNP won in the parliamentary elections in 1977 in parliament, Jayewardene held a referendum in 1982 to extend the term of office of the elected parliament by a further six years. The reason for the extension of the term of office was the need for stable majorities to implement necessary political and economic reforms. A majority agreed to the extension of the term of office in the referendum and the parliament elected in 1977, in which the UNP had a four-fifths majority, with largely unchanged personnel, remained in office for twelve years until 1989. The UNP government and the president had a free hand to pursue a policy as they saw fit. In addition to the civil war, which placed the country under enormous social and economic stress and temporarily (1987–1990) led to the stationing of Indian troops in the northern part of the island, there was another crisis from 1987 onwards. The Marxist Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP, “People's Liberation Front”) attempted to trigger a revolutionary state of anarchy and thereby overthrow the government with bomb attacks, kidnappings and acts of terrorism. Numerous politicians fell victim to the attacks. The government was ultimately successful in suppressing the uprising and was able to eliminate or imprison the leadership of the JVP under Rohana Wijeweera until 1989/1990. There were mass arrests of thousands of JVP activists and their sympathizers. Critics accused the government of waging a dirty war with the use of torture, illegal killings, the disappearance of unpopular people, etc., in disregard for human rights.

In the 1988 presidential election Jayewardene did not run and in his place the UNP candidate Ranasinghe Premadasa won the election. Due to the chaos in the country, only 55% of those eligible to vote had taken part in the election. Premadasa was killed in an LTTE suicide attack on May 1, 1993 in Colombo . According to the constitution, the incumbent Prime Minister Dingiri Banda Wijetunga then assumed the office of President. On June 24, 1994 Wijetunga let the parliament dissolve prematurely and call new elections. The parliamentary election on August 16, 1994 was won by the opposition People's Alliance (PA), an alliance of parties led by the Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP). The SLFP or PA had been reorganized in previous years under the leadership of Chandrika Kumaratunga . Kumaratunga then became prime minister of a new government.

Election announcement and election campaign

After the election defeat in the parliamentary elections in August that year, Gamini Dissayanake was elected as the new UNP party leader. In the internal election in the UNP parliamentary group, he narrowly prevailed against his rival Ranil Wickremesinghe with 45 to 42 votes with seven abstentions. The incumbent President Wijetunga declared that he did not want to run for the upcoming presidential election, so Dissayanake was nominated for the presidential candidate of the UNP. The JVP had not yet been re-approved as an official political party and, as in the previous parliamentary election, ran under the name Sri Lanka Progressive Front (SLPF). Her top candidate was Galappaththi Arachchige Nihal. The Sinhala nationalist Sinhalaye Mahasammatha Bhoomiputra Pakshaya (SMBP, "Great Unity Party of the Sons of the Earth of Sri Lanka") presented the publicist Harischandra Wijetunga as a candidate. The six candidates listed below were accepted for election. All candidates were given voting symbols that were printed on the ballot papers to enable illiterate voters to vote. Kumaratunga was the only woman among the 6 candidates.

Name of the candidate	Supporter / Political Party	Election symbol
Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga	People's Alliance	chair
Galappaththi Arachchige Nihal	Sri Lanka Progressive Front	Vase
Gamini Dissanayake	United National Party	elephant
AJ Ranasinghe	More independent	swan
Harischandra Wijetunga	Sinhalye Mahasammatha Bhoomiputra Pakshaya	plane
Hudson Samarasinghe	More independent	table

On August 24, 1994, UNP top candidate Gamini Dissanayake was the victim of a suicide bomb attack at an election rally in Colombo. With him more than 50 people who were near him died. The LTTE denied involvement in the attack, but was widely held responsible for it. Remains of a cyanide capsule of the kind used by LTTE assassins were found at the site of the attack . The UNP then did not nominate Ranil Wickremesinghe, but Dissanayake's widow, Vajira Srimathi ("Srima") Dissanayake, a 51-year-old judge, as the top candidate, hoping to gain a sympathy bonus in the election. After the event, disputes over how to deal with the Tamil Tigers determined the final phase of the election campaign. The Kumaratunga government temporarily suspended all talks with the LTTE, but avoided blaming them directly for the attack.

Results

A total of 7,713,232 votes were cast. With 10,945,065 registered voters, this corresponded to a turnout of 70.47%. The turnout was thus below the average of previous elections. 151,706 votes (1.97%) were invalid.

Results nationwide

Surname		Political party	Absolutely	Votes in percent
	Chandrika Kumaratunga	PA	4,709,205	62.28
	Vajira Srimathi Dissanayake	UNP	2,715,285	35.91
	Hudson Samarasinghe	-	58,886	0.78
	Harischandra Wijaythunga	SMBP	32,651	0.43
	AJ Ranasinghe	-	22,752	0.30
	Galappaththi Arachchige Nihal	SLPF	22,749	0.30
Valid votes			7,561,526	100.0

Results by constituency

Chandrika Kumaratunga received a majority of the votes in all 22 constituencies. The turnout varied greatly from region to region. In the predominantly Tamil constituencies of the northeast province , large parts of the population did not vote. The LTTE had called for a boycott of elections in the areas it controlled and threatened any voters with repression. In the northern constituency of Jaffna, the turnout was just under 3%.

Constituency	Kumaratunga (PA, in%)	Nihal (SLPF, in%)	Dissanayake (UNP, in%)	Ranasinghe (independent, in%)	Wijethunga (SMBP, in%)	Samarasinghe (independent, in%)	Invalid votes (in%)	Turnout (in%)	Registered voters
Colombo	64.82	0.21	33.56	0.41	0.70	0.29	1.83	70.91	1,235,959
Gampaha	64.74	0.22	33.93	0.32	0.43	0.35	1.52	75.71	1,140,808
Kalutara	61.47	0.29	37.10	0.29	0.39	0.46	1.50	75.57	646.199
Mahanuwara	56.64	0.24	41.68	0.31	0.46	0.66	2.45	79.77	726.192
Matale	60.98	0.34	36.82	0.31	0.50	1.06	2.60	78.87	259.271
Nuwara Eliya	57.14	0.35	39.55	0.37	0.45	2.14	3.85	79.52	386,668
bile	61.40	0.32	37.28	0.25	0.34	0.41	1.51	74.62	632.422
Matara	64.69	0.40	33.56	0.32	0.44	0.58	1.60	71.10	503,470
Hambantota	61.52	0.78	35.99	0.35	0.71	0.65	1.82	67.30	326.913
Jaffna	96.35	0.14	1.27	0.09	0.20	1.94	0.80	2.97	596.366
Vanni	85.30	0.30	11.41	0.20	0.24	2.55	1.70	22.41	178,697
Batticaloa	87.30	0.29	8.93	0.23	0.21	3.03	1.58	64.32	261,898
Digamadulla	72.36	0.25	25.40	0.21	0.20	1.58	1.53	75.70	312.006
Trincomalee	71.62	0.30	25.74	0.18	0.26	1.91	1.56	60.05	184.090
Kurunegala	59.36	0.27	39.21	0.25	0.32	0.59	1.52	78.81	876.591
Puttalam	62.65	0.24	35.98	0.22	0.23	0.68	1.74	70.84	380.192
Anuradhapura	63.99	0.35	34.32	0.22	0.32	0.81	1.95	78.39	406.926
Polonnaruwa	59.08	0.31	39.40	0.17	0.28	0.75	2.57	77.15	200.192
Badulla	55.27	0.41	42.21	0.42	0.53	1.16	4.09	79.23	435.260
Moneragala	63.20	0.54	34.03	0.36	0.57	1.29	2.54	78.66	199.391
Ratnapura	58.07	0.29	40.16	0.28	0.42	0.78	1.69	81.23	554607
Kegalle	56.06	0.27	42.30	0.27	0.37	0.73	1.86	76.80	500,947
total	62.28	0.30	35.91	0.30	0.43	0.78	1.97	70.47	10,945,065

Voting cards

• Majorities according to constituencies and constituencies
• 

  Majorities in the 22 constituencies: Kumaratunga, turnout> 60% Kumaratunga, turnout 22.4% Kumaratunga, turnout 3.0%
  
  
  

• 

  Majorities in the 160 electoral districts: Kumaratunga, turnout> 60% Kumaratunga, turnout 30% Kumaratunga, turnout 1-2% Kumaratunga, turnout 0-1% Dissanayake
  
  
  
  
  

Development according to the choice

On the evening of the election, election winner Kumaratunga declared that the country had reached “the end of a long dark tunnel” and was now moving towards “a new era of freedom and light”. She promised that she would continue the peace process to end the civil war that had claimed 30,000 deaths in the previous 11 years. On November 12, 1994, she officially took office as President. She appointed her own 78-year-old mother Sirimavo Bandaranaike as her successor in the office of Prime Minister , who had already held this office from 1960 to 1965 and from 1970 to 1977.

Web links

• PAST PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION RESULTS , Results at the Department of Elections of Sri Lanka (English)

Individual evidence

1. ^ Edward A. Gargan: Suicide Bomber Kills President of Sri Lanka. The New York Times, May 2, 1993, accessed December 5, 2015 . 
2. ^ Patrick Peebles: The History of Sri Lanka (The Greenwood Histories of the Modern Nations). Greenwood Press (2006), ISBN 0313332053 . P. 164
3. ^ Sri Lankan Claims Victory in Presidential Vote. The New York Times, November 10, 1994, accessed December 5, 2015 . 
4. ^ Colombo investigators find pieces of cyanide capsule. New Straits Times, October 26, 1994, accessed December 5, 2015 (Google News digitized). 
5. ↑ Sudha Ramachandran: Suicide, the ultimate Tiger weapon. Asia Times online, July 10, 2002, accessed December 5, 2015 . 
6. ↑ ^{a b} John-Thor Dahlburg: Sri Lankan Premier's Presidential Victory a Landslide: Election: Chandrika Kumaratunga is first woman to attain top post. She pledges to pursue peace with Tamil rebels. Los Angeles Times, November 11, 1994, accessed December 5, 2015 . 
7. ↑ P. Jayaram: Another shattering blow. indiatoday.in, November 15, 1994, accessed December 5, 2015 . 
8. ^ ^{A b} Presidential Elections Results. Retrieved November 14, 2016 (results from the Sri Lankan Electoral Commission).