Sri Lankan President Chandrika Kumaratunga's leftist coalition swept key local council elections which were marked by an unusually low turnout, officials here said Sunday.
Kumaratunga's Marxist-backed United Freedom Alliance won comfortably in all but one district that went to the polls Saturday, election officials said as final results were tallied.
They said only about half of the 9.6 million electorate had turned out to vote, making it one of the lowest polling elections in recent years.
Kumaratunga herself stayed away from voting because she was "indisposed", a spokesman for her office said.
The ballot was the second local election since the April 2 parliamentary vote, which was called four years ahead of schedule to settle a power struggle between Kumaratunga and her rival, then-prime minister Ranil Wickremesinghe.
Provincial councils are the highest level of local government in Sri Lanka.
A total of 4,134 candidates representing 23 political parties and 32 independent groups stood for 316 council seats in Saturday's ballot.
The council election was initially thrown into doubt after polls chief Dayananda Dissanayake, 62, suffered a heart attack last week, leaving the vote literally depending on the man's life.
An election official said they expected Dissanayake to make an appearance at the office Sunday to sign the final results.
Dissanayake had already suffered five heart attacks but his attempts to throw in the towel have been held up by another legal technicality.
He went to the supreme court last year seeking to retire as he had reached public servants' mandatory retirement age of 60.
But the government established a new elections commission in 2001, and Kumaratunga has yet to name its members, forcing Dissanayake to stay in the job until fresh appointments are made.
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