Former President Mahinda Rajapaksa bid adieu to his highly contentious stint as “Prime Minister” yesterday vowing to put together a power bloc to take on the UNP. “The change of government the people expected has now had to be put off, but the people will definitely get the change they desire. The coming together of [...]

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Rajapaksa quits but vows to put together anti-UNP power bloc

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Former President Mahinda Rajapaksa bid adieu to his highly contentious stint as “Prime Minister” yesterday vowing to put together a power bloc to take on the UNP. “The change of government the people expected has now had to be put off, but the people will definitely get the change they desire. The coming together of the Joint Opposition and the SLFP group that was in the government has now created a power bloc that commands around 54 percent of the vote base,” Mr. Rajapaksa, who is also a UPFA Kurunegala District MP, said.

Shortly after his speech at his Wijerama Mawatha residence, Mr. Rajapaksa signed a document, which he said was his letter of resignation from the post of Prime Minister. However Mr. Rajapaksa ceased to hold the post of Prime Minister from November 15 after Speaker Karu Jayasuriya said he did not recognise him or his Cabinet after a No-Confidence Motion against them was approved by Parliament. Subsequently, the Court of Appeal also issued an interim order, suspending Mr. Rajapaksa and his Cabinet from functioning in their posts.

Mr. Rajapaksa said he and his supporters were now in “direct confrontation with a group of political parties that have continuously engaged in various subterfuges to avoid facing elections, first delaying the Provincial Councils polls and now depriving the people of a general election.” He said the UNP, which has 103, seats had been taken hostage by the TNA and that the TNA held the remote control in Parliament. He also spoke of a purported new constitution that the UNP planned to bring in, claiming it would divide the country into nine semi-independent federal units.

He said he had been sworn in on October 26 in an interim arrangement that would have lasted two months before an election was held and defended President Maithripala Sirisena’s move, saying that the “President cannot stand by and do nothing when the country is facing destruction at the hands of the people running the country.”

Mr. Rajapaksa said that as their plans were aborted by the Supreme Court rulings, they could not implement any of the measures they had planned to prevent the country from becoming another Greece. “The UNP brought our country to the brink of economic collapse through foreign borrowings,” he said.

Mr. Rajapaksa said one success of the Oct. 26 events was that the UNP no longer commanded a two-thirds majority in Parliament and hence it was now possible to block the passage of a new constitution that had been “drafted by the same individuals who turned the country into an ungovernable mess through the 19th Amendment.”

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