Sri Lanka’s protest movement reached its 100th day on Sunday, having removed one President and now focusing on his successor as the country’s economic crisis continues.
Gotabaya Rajapaksa fled his palace shortly before demonstrators stormed it last weekend and resigned from the presidency on Thursday.
His mismanagement is blamed for Sri Lanka’s financial turmoil, which has forced its 22 million people to endure food, fuel, and medicine shortages since late 2021.
The anti-Rajapaksa campaign, organised primarily through posts on Facebook, Twitter, and TikTok, drew people from across Sri Lanka’s often insurmountable ethnic divides.
United by economic hardships, minority Tamils and Muslims joined the majority Sinhalese to demand the ouster of the once-powerful Rajapaksa clan.
It began as a two-day protest on April 9, when tens of thousands of people set up camp in front of Rajapaksa’s office – a crowd so much larger than the organisers’ expectations, that they decided to stay on.
“When I heard the news and saw what was happening here, I decided that I should come and help them,” Nilu, a teacher from a beach town on Sri Lanka’s southern coast, told newsmen.
The 26-year-old took up residence in the camp last month and is among dozens of volunteers working in the patchwork of tents now lining a section of the seafront boulevard.
A communal kitchen serves food for needy crowds visiting the site in the evenings, who queue next to signboards detailing the numerous accusations of graft and violence directed at Rajapaksa’s family.
“We need a change and we are the change,” said Nilu, who declined to give her surname.
“We want our president to represent the whole country. Not somebody who robs the public.”
Under Sri Lanka’s constitution, Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe was automatically installed as acting President following Rajapaksa’s resignation.
He is now the leading candidate to succeed him permanently in a parliamentary vote next week.
But the veteran politician is despised by the protesters as an ally of the Rajapaksa clan – four brothers who have dominated the island’s politics for years.