Maithripala Sirisena (born 3 September 1951) was President of Sri Lanka from 9 January 2015 to 18 November 2019, succeeding Mahinda Rajapaksa and preceding Gotabaya Rajapaksa. He was a member of the social democratic Sri Lanka Freedom Party.
Biography[]
Maithripala Sirisena was born in Yagoda, Ceylon on 3 September 1951, and he became a communist while he was a student. In 1968, he joined the Sri Lanka Freedom Party he was later elected to Parliament in 1989. He held several ministries from 1994; in 2014, while serving as Minister of Health, he ran for President as the opposition's consensus candidate. In addition to winning rural Sinhalese voters, he also won the support of Tamils and Muslims who were alienated by Rajapaksa's post-Civil War policies. He promised to enact several reforms targeting corruption and punishing Civil War war crimes, but he later publicly disavowed his program. He issued gazettes every Friday from 16 October 2018, and his firing of his former ally, Ranil Wickremesinghe, as Prime Minister and his replacement with the opposition leader Mahinda Rajapaksa caused a constitutional crisis. In November 2019, he left office after Mahinda's younger brother Gotabaya Rajapaksa was elected President.