Elections, Peace and Conflict, Politics and Governance

10 reasons why you should celebrate Mahinda Rajapaksa’s victory

  1. Sarath Fonseka lost. We no longer need to stress ourselves to a level requiring medication worrying about what he might do if he wins. We can stop pretending to like him.
  2. Mahinda Rajapaksa can never ever run for President again (unless of course he changes the constitution).
  3. Stuck between the devil and the deep blue sea, almost 75% of people still went out and voted. That’s always a good thing.
  4. Almost 2% of the people voted for someone other than Mahinda and Sarath. That’s just awesome. We haven’t seen that in some time.
  5. Compared to landslide victories in recent provincial council polls, 57.88% is a significant drop in popularity for the Rajapakse Government. (E.g. from 72.39% to 58.59% in Uva) This trend could hurt Mahinda’s chances of getting a 2/3 majority in the Parliament.
  6. The Tamil people have made it very clear that they don’t believe that Rajapakse is doing anything for them. Now we can see if how he responds to that. After a really really long time, they had their say.
  7. The UNP won’t have to worry about winning anything for some time, so they have six years to get their act together and become the Opposition that we want. We hope they’ll deliver.
  8. The JVP has been proven to be irrelevant. This election has compromised the hold that the IUSF has in the Universities and only good can come out of that.
  9. Douglas, Karuna and Pillayan, with all their guns and their goons couldn’t deliver the East and the North to Mahinda. No one’s really afraid of them anymore.
  10. It’s all downhill for Rajapaksa from here. One month from now we won’t be able to find one single person who voted for him.

Published on Groundviews with the kind permission of author who first sent the original version of this article via email. This was also written before the announcement made today that Parliament will be dissolved soon.