Heir apparent to Sri Lanka’s powerful Rajapaksa family will run in September’s presidential election

COLOMBO, Sri Lanka (AP) — The man who is considered the heir apparent to the powerful Rajapaksa family in Sri Lanka will contest the presidential election in September, his political party said Wednesday, in an apparent bid to regain his family’s lost power after a humiliating setback two years ago during an unprecedented economic crisis in the Indian ocean island nation.

The Sri Lanka Peoples’ Front said the 38-year-old lawyer Namal Rajapaksa, the eldest son of former strongman president Mahinda Rajapaksa, will be its candidate in the Sept. 21 election, the first since the nation plunged into its worst economic crisis.

The election is seen as key to Sri Lanka’s efforts to conclude a critical debt restructuring program and completing the financial reforms agreed to under a bailout program by the International Monetary Fund.

The nominations for polling will be accepted on Aug. 15.

The Rajapaksa family has dominated Sri Lankan politics since the country gained independence from Britain in 1948, producing a dozen of lawmakers from three generations over seven decades. Mahinda Rajapaksa ruled as president from 2005 to 2015, appealing to the nationalist sentiment of the island’s Buddhist-Sinhalese majority.

Rajapaksa is revered by that majority for leading Sri Lanka to victory over ethnic Tamil rebels in 2009, ending a 26-year civil war.

In 2015, he lost to the opposition led by his former aide. But the family made a comeback in 2019, when Rajapaksa’s younger brother Gotabaya won the presidential election on a promise to restore security in the wake of the Easter Sunday suicide bombings that killed 290 people.

But the Rajapaksa family lost power unexpectedly in 2022 when Sri Lanka was engulfed in its worst economic crisis that