Sri Lanka's left-leaning ruling party is eyeing a landslide victory in the election | Political Affairs

The Sri Lankan President's National People's Power party won 62% of the vote, preliminary results said.

Sri Lankan President Anura Kumara Dissanayake's coalition is on course for a landslide victory in snap elections, giving the Marxist-leaning leader a powerful mandate to ease sanctions in the troubled country.

With more than half of the votes counted on Friday morning, Dissanayake's National People's Power (NPP) was far ahead of the opposition coalition, Samagi Jana Balawegaya (SJB) with 62 percent of the vote, according to preliminary results from the country's Electoral Commission.

The NPP had taken 80 seats in the 225-member parliament, compared to SBJ's 21 seats, and was leading in all but one of the 22 constituencies, according to the results.

Turnout in Thursday's polls was about 65 percent, according to the election commission, lower than in September's presidential election when about 80 percent of eligible people voted.

Dissanayake won the September presidential election riding a wave of popular discontent with the austerity measures imposed by his predecessor, Ranil Wickremesinghe, as part of a bailout deal with the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

With his coalition holding only three seats in the outgoing parliament, the 55-year-old leader of the Janatha Vimukti Peramuna (JVP) has called for snap legislative elections to secure a new mandate.

Disanayake expressed confidence ahead of the vote, telling local media on Thursday that he expected a “strong majority” in parliament.

“We believe that this is an important election that will mark changes in Sri Lanka,” Dissanayake told reporters after voting at a station in the capital.

“There is a change in the political culture of Sri Lanka that started in September, which must continue.”

Dissanayake, whose JVP led a bloody armed uprising against the government in the 1970s and 1980s, has pledged to fight corruption and seek “alternatives” to stabilize the South Asian country's finances that put less of a burden on the poor.

Although Dissanayake was a vocal critic of the IMF deal during his presidential campaign, he has recently expressed broad approval of its goals while stressing the importance of caring for struggling Sri Lankans.

Sri Lanka has been struggling to recover from its worst economic crisis since independence in 1948 following economic mismanagement by successive governments, the COVID-19 pandemic and the 2019 Easter bombings.

In 2022, then-President Gotabaya Rajapaksa was forced to resign after tens of thousands of Sri Lankans took to the streets to protest inflation and fuel and food shortages.

Rajapaksa's successor, Wickremesinghe, who came third in September's presidential election, is committed to economic recovery, but his government's efforts to raise revenue, including raising electricity bills and income taxes, have proved unpopular.