MP Prof. Charitha Herath urges the country to stand together to defeat the highly-personalized power agenda of president Ranil Wickremesinghe to postpone the upcoming local government election.
Prof. Herath, a top figure in the Freedom People’s Council, has tweeted, “Prez’s proposal to postpone upcoming LGA’s election is a damn illegitimate move by an unelected but a succeeding president. What he tries to do is the same thing they did for provincial councils.”
His comment came after the president’s statement yesterday that a referendum will decide on the parliamentary election system if a proposed select committee fails to reach consensus by July next year.
At a meeting with a group of professionals at the Presidential Secretariat yesterday, he also said desired changes to the political system should be brought about in accordance with the people’s aspirations, as a majority of them rejected the existing one, he said.
The president said he hoped to halve the 8,000-odd local government members and implement a Jana Sabha system before the next election.
Executive powers of Pradeshiya Sabha chairmen should be vested on chairmen-based committees, the laws for which will be formulated before the next election for LG bodies.
Wickremesinghe said the preferential voting system, the root cause of political corruption, should be replaced soon by a list-based system with non-preferential votes or a mixed system.
Limitations should be imposed as well by the law on the money spent on election propaganda, he added.
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