Hundreds of people demonstrated in the streets of Sri Lanka’s capital Colombo on Wednesday in a march called by more than 150 organizations to protest against the government of Ranil Wickremesinghe.
The demonstrators have marched from the Elphinstone theater while a strong police device cut off the streets, even preventing the passage of members of the opposition Samagi Jana Balawegaya Jana party.
After several tense moments in which the attendees tried to push the police officers, the leader of the opposition party, Sajith Premadasa, as well as some of his colleagues, called for calm and the cessation of violence, according to the newspaper ‘Daily Mirror’.
The appointment of Wickremesinghe as new president has not completely calmed the population, which considers that it is a «patch» to what is already the biggest crisis faced by the country since it achieved independence from the United Kingdom.
Wickremesinghe, who was appointed president by Parliament on July 20 after Gotabaya Rajapaksa fled, has given the country some sense of stability after addressing water and fuel shortages, the main reasons why the population decided to occupy the streets.
The former president gave in after several months of protests over rising prices, lack of food, medicine and fuel, which put the small Asian island on the path of its worst economic crisis since it gained independence from the British colonial yoke.
The popular revolution in Sri Lanka thus forced the definitive fall of the Rajapaksa family, after former president Gotabaya Rajapaksa forced his brother Mahinda to step down as prime minister at the beginning of May in a superfluous attempt to quell the protests.
