Veteran politician Ranil Wickremesinghe was sworn in as Sri Lanka’s new president on Thursday, a day after winning a vote in parliament and urging the island nation to come together to find a way out of its worst economic crisis in decades.
The six-time prime minister succeeded Gotabaya Rajapaksa who fled Sri Lanka and resigned from his post last week after mass protests over his handling of the economy. The swearing in ceremony was conducted in parliament, and presided over by the country’s chief justice.
Sri Lanka received fresh diesel supplies over the weekend, and the main state-run distributor, Ceylon Petroleum Corporation, will restart sales under a new rationing system from Thursday onwards, the power and energy ministry said. Only a handful of people were present outside the presidential secretariat on Thursday, a colonial-era building that was stormed by a sea of protesters earlier this month along with the president and prime minister’s official residences.“We won’t give up because what the country needs is a total system change,” said Pratibha Fernando, a protester at the secretariat. “We want to get rid of these corrupt politicians, so that’s what we are doing.
“I am not a friend of the Rajapaksas. I am a friend of the people,” he told reporters after praying at a Buddhist temple in the commercial capital Colombo.
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