Veteran politician Ranil Wickremesinghe was sworn in as Sri Lanka’s new president on Thursday, a day after he won a parliamentary vote and urged the country to come together to find a way out of its worst economic crisis in decades.
The country of 22 million people suffers from a foreign exchange shortage, causing fuel, food and medicine shortages as prices rise.
In June, inflation reached 59 percent a year, according to the statistics office.
Wickremesinghe, a six-time prime minister, replaces Gotabaya Rajapaksa, who fled Sri Lanka and resigned last week after mass protests against his handling of the economy. The opening ceremony was held in Parliament and was presided over by the country’s Chief Justice.
According to the Ministry of Energy, Sri Lanka received new diesel supplies over the weekend, and main state distributor Ceylon Petroleum Corporation will restart sales under a new rationing system from this Thursday.
The protest movement that ousted Sri Lanka’s first resigned president, Rajapaksa, has remained largely silent, despite Wickremesinghe’s unpopularity among some segments of the population.
Outside the presidential secretariat on Thursday, a colonial-era building that was overrun by a sea of protesters earlier this month, there were only a few outside the official residences of the president and prime minister.
But some promised to fight Wickremesinghe.
“We will not give up because what the country needs is total system change,” said protester Pratibha Fernando from the secretariat. “We want to get rid of these corrupt politicians, so that’s what we’re doing.”
source: Noticias
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