Anura’s coalition gets landslide victory in Sri Lanka polls

Sri Lankan President Anura Kumara Dissanayake's leftist coalition has won a landslide victory in snap legislative elections.

Dissanayake, the 55-year-old son of a labourer, said he expected a strong majority in parliament to press ahead with his platform after casting his ballot in Thursday's poll.

Results showed Friday that his National People's Power (NPP) coalition is taking at least 123 seats in the 225-member assembly and on track to win many more.

The coalition had a monumental 62 per cent of the vote among the more than three-quarters of ballots counted so far, while opposition leader Sajith Premadasa's party was well behind with only 18 per cent.

Voters have repudiated establishment parties blamed for triggering an economic crisis.

Dissanayake, a self-avowed Marxist, swept September presidential elections on a promise to combat graft and recover stolen assets, two years after a slow-motion financial crash imposed widespread hardships on the island nation.

In a sign of the magnitude of support for Dissanayake, his party won the most votes in the northern district of Jaffna, dominated by the island's minority Tamil community, for the first time since independence from Britain in 1948.