Sri Lanka's former leader Mahinda Rajapakse on Monday demanded a snap general election and challenged his successor's right to govern after drubbing the ruling coalition in crucial mid-term polls. Rajapakse's new party secured two-thirds of Sri Lanka's councils in a surprise blitz of local elections, humiliating the governing alliance as it reels from internal crises and divisions over leadership.
"The government no longer has a mandate," said Rajapakse, who lost presidential and parliamentary polls in 2015 after ruling the island with an iron fist for a decade. "I ask the president to call a general election."
Rajapakse, whose family wields enormous influence in Sri Lanka, staged a dramatic comeback at the weekend as his Sri Lanka Podujana Peramuna - SLPP or People's Front - pulled off the landslide victory. Rajapakse's party comfortably won in all regions bar the battle-scarred north and east where, as president, he brutally crushed a separatist Tamil movement to end the island's ethnic war in 2009.
The vote affects only the lowest rung of politics but the result is being seen as a stinging rebuke to the ruling coalition, which has struggled to pass promised post-war reforms.