Political will required
[ Daily Pioneer ] - [ Apr 01, 2010 10:14:26 GMT ]With Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa on an unprecedented winning spree on the battlefield and at the hustings, can he secure a two-thirds majority in the parliamentary elections on April 8? The complex proportional representation system virtually rules out such an outcome on the strength of just his own party. Mr Rajapaksa wants to drop reliance on defectors and inconvenient allies which had forced him to appoint 113 Ministers out of his alliance’s 131 legislators. Technically he needs another 19 seats to reach the magic figure of 151 in a 225-member House. So rampant is political opportunism that UNF leader Ranil Wickremesinghe has made his party members sign an affidavit to preempt any post-poll defections. [ full story ]