Could Sri Lanka’s Rajapaksas return, like the Marcos family?
Could the disgraced Rajapaksas return to power, like the Marcos family has in the Philippines?
Sri Lanka’s dramatic demonstration of people power — forcing a despised president to flee the country — has rekindled memories of a similar peaceful uprising on another island nation, the Philippines.
But thoughts are also turning to the sobering denouement of that public protest in Manila nearly 40 years ago.
In Sri Lanka, as with the Philippines in 1986, a largely non-violent uprising has driven out a leader whose family had wielded power for a couple of decades.
In both countries, the world watched as crowds surged into the opulent presidential palace, gawping at the luxury amid which their leader lived.
As with the Marcos political dynasty in the Philippines, Sri Lanka’s Rajapaksas are accused of enriching themselves at the expense of their country.
And now, some supporters of Sri Lanka’s former president Gotabaya Rajapaksa and his family are hoping the parallels with the Philippines go even further.
Tharaka Balasuriya, a minister in Rajapaksa’s government and a member of parliament belonging to Rajapaksa’s Sri Lanka Freedom Party, recently told the BBC: “We saw what happened in the Philippines, Marcos’s son has returned to power… So at some time, someone from the Rajapaksa family could come back to power. So I would never say never…I wouldn’t bet against it.”
The current situation in Sri Lanka seems exactly like the Philippines
- Ashok Swain, professor of peace and conflict research at Uppsala University
Some Sri Lankans say that the Rajapaksas may even be helped in the short term by newly elected president Ranil Wickremesinghe
Read on at https://www.opendemocracy.net.
