‘Only the beginning’: Sri Lankans hope for deep changes under new president

Marxist-leaning Anura Kumara Dissanayake’s call for unity amid ethnic divisions and pro-people economic reforms resonate in the crisis-hit nation of 22 million people.

Colombo, Sri Lanka – For Dilshan Jayasanka, the victory of Anura Kumara Dissanayake as Sri Lanka’s first Marxist-leaning president is the beginning of a “radical new path” for the crisis-hit island nation.

Just more than two years ago, the 29-year-old former floor manager at a restaurant in Colombo was a regular visitor to Gota Go Gama, the tent city erected by tens of thousands of protesters in the city’s picturesque Galle Face area.

The protests in 2022 were aimed at toppling the then-President Gotabaya Rajapaksa’s government, which was blamed for Sri Lanka’s worst economic crisis since its independence from British rule in 1948.

After the restaurant he worked at was forced to close due to the financial meltdown, Jayasanka made the tent city his home.

“Many non-partisan people who took part in ‘Aragalaya’ [struggle in Sinhalese] are now with the National Peoples Power [NPP],” Jayasanka told Al Jazeera on Tuesday, a day after Dissanayake, who leads the NPP alliance, was sworn in as the country’s ninth president.

As Dissanayake assumed the presidential office, located right opposite Colombo’s Galle Face, Jayasanka, who had spent weeks there in 2022 fighting for change in his country, said: “I believe his victory is a positive development for my country. I hope he will make a better Sri Lanka.”

Jayasanka also hailed the 55-year-old leader for appointing Harini Amarasuriya, one of NPP’s three legislators in the 225-member parliament, as the country’s new prime minister, making her the country’s first woman to head the government in 24 years.

“As someone