Maithripala Sirisena

Maithripala Yapa Sirisena (Sinhala: පල්ලෙවත්‍ත ගමරාළලාගේ මෛත්‍රීපාල යාපා සිරිසේන; Tamil: பல்லேவத்த கமராளலாகே மைத்திரிபால யாப்பா சிறிசேன; born 3 September 1951) is a Sri Lankan politician who served as the seventh president of Sri Lanka from 9 January 2015 to 18 November 2019. Sirisena is Sri Lanka's first president from the North Central Province of the country and does not belong to the traditional Sri Lankan political elite. He served as a member of parliament from Polonnaruwa from 1989 to 2015 and from 2020 to 2024. Sirisena joined mainstream politics in 1989 as a member of the Parliament of Sri Lanka and has held several ministries since 1994. He was the general-secretary of the Sri Lanka Freedom Party and was Minister of Health until November 2014 when he announced his candidacy in the 2015 presidential election as the "common candidate" of a coalition of opposition parties, running against party leader and incumbent president Mahinda Rajapaksa. His victory in the election was generally viewed as an upset, coming to office through votes won from the alternative Sinhala-majority rural constituency and the Tamil and Muslim minority groups that were alienated by the Rajapaksa government on post-war reconciliation and growing sectarian violence. Sirisena pledged to implement a 100-day reform program where he promised to rebalance the executive branch within 100 days of being elected. This plan included reinforcing Sri Lanka's judiciary and parliament, investigation of alleged war crimes during the final stages of the Sri Lankan civil war, repealing the controversial eighteenth amendment and re-instating the seventeenth amendment, reducing corruption and appointing UNP leader Ranil Wickremesinghe as prime minister. He later was reported to have publicly disavowed this program, claiming that he did not know where it originated. Sirisena was sworn in as the sixth Executive President on 9 January 2015. Immediately afterwards he appointed...