President of Sri Lanka, commonly known as AKD. Elected around September 2024, after which his National People's Power (NPP) coalition won a huge parliamentary majority in November 2024. The NPP is dominated by the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna party (JVP), which led two armed insurgencies in the 1970s and 1980s espousing an ideology that uniquely combines Marxism and Sinhala-Buddhist nationalism. The JVP has a Leninist structure—central committee, six-man Politburo and all.
Sri Lankans elected AKD out of frustration with years of incompetence under the mainstream parties. His government is widely praised as marking a clear break from the cronyism and nepotism it supplanted, and has pursued corruption allegations against its predecessors. It has meekly accepted an IMF programme negotiated in 2023 by the previous president, Ranil Wickremesinghe.
AKD remains personally popular, according to analysts in Colombo. A charismatic speaker, he reaches Sri Lankans via giant rallies and social-media clips. His government has successfully transformed Sri Lanka's "axis of polarisation" from the "national" question about the status of Tamils to one defined by popular resentment of a corrupt elite.
In local elections in May 2025 the NPP did less well in the Tamil north, suggesting disillusionment among Tamil voters who had hoped AKD would tackle their grievances.
In November 2025 Cyclone Ditwah—Sri Lanka's worst natural disaster since the 2004 tsunami—ravaged the island for three days. The government botched the immediate response: some towns received no warning despite officials in Colombo knowing what was coming, and medical supplies took over a week to reach remote areas. More than 800 people died. The recovery phase went better, with roads and railways quickly reopened. Portraits of Marx, Engels and Lenin still hang at JVP headquarters, and insiders say some decisions must pass through a politburo on which Mr Dissanayake and party apparatchiks sit, which can slow the government's actions.
Having won power, Mr Dissanayake—whose JVP long looked to Russia and China for inspiration—has tilted not towards China but to India. India provided the most generous disaster-relief package after Cyclone Ditwah: $100m in aid and $350m in concessional loans, with Indian helicopters running rescue missions from an aircraft carrier and Indian engineers rebuilding dozens of bridges. China, by contrast, was notably absent; some in Colombo speculate it is waiting for a $3bn oil refinery project to be signed off.
Rather than tearing up the IMF programme negotiated by his predecessor, Mr Dissanayake has earned plaudits from the fund for exceeding belt-tightening targets, largely by boosting tax revenues while holding down spending. His government has delivered two budgets. "It's like the parish priest preaching bana at the Buddhist temple," says Harsha de Silva of the liberal SJB party. Beyond being anti-graft and pro-IMF, however, the government has little sense of direction. A fiscal surplus has been achieved in part by cutting much-needed capital investment.
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