Image: Reuters Berita 24 English - Basil Rajapaksa , the brother of Sri Lanka's president and former finance minister, announced his r...
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| Image: Reuters |
Berita 24 English - Basil Rajapaksa, the brother of Sri Lanka's president and former finance minister, announced his resignation from parliament on Thursday, becoming the second member of the prominent family to leave government amid a severe economic crisis.
Rajapaksa stated, "I shall no longer participate in any government activity, but I cannot and will not leave politics."
"The goal is to allow someone else from the party to be appointed to parliament in my stead," he told reporters in Sri Lanka's commercial hub, Colombo.
Mahinda Rajapaksa, the older brother of President Gotabaya Rajapaksa, resigned as prime minister last month after violent protests against the economic crisis.
Mahinda retains his parliamentary seat.
The three Rajapaksa siblings have been prominent figures in Sri Lankan politics for decades, but hundreds of demonstrators have taken to the streets in recent months to accuse them of mismanaging the economy of the island nation.
Reuters has stated that Basil Rajapaksa is likely to retain influence despite the fact that sibling rivalry has contributed to Sri Lanka's descent into chaos.
The 22 million-person nation is experiencing its greatest economic crisis in seven decades, with gasoline, pharmaceutical, and cooking gas shortages due to a chronic dearth of foreign currency, which has halted imports.
Ranil Wickremesinghe, the new prime minister of Sri Lanka, is currently leading attempts to find a way out of the crisis, with negotiations with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) for a loan programme and assistance from friendly countries, like India and China.
Wickremesinghe is dependent on the ruling Sri Lanka Podujana Peramuna (SLPP) party, which Basil Rajapaksa has helped rebuild into a political powerhouse. Wickremesinghe has only one seat in parliament.
Basil Rajapaksa will continue to be a political power in Sri Lanka despite not being an elected official, according to Bhavani Fonseka, a senior researcher at the Centre for Policy Analysis in Colombo.
"The question is how much control or influence he has over the SLPP," said Fonseka.
Several sources have previously informed Reuters that members of the ruling party remain loyal to Basil Rajapaksa. The SLPP and its coalition partners hold a solid majority of the 225-seat legislature.
The experienced politician, who served as Sri Lanka's finance minister between July 2021 and April of this year, denied that he had failed to halt the country's financial decline.
"I was the individual who sent the first letter to the IMF after assuming the position of finance minister. "The work I initiated is now being carried forward," he remarked.
"I have no regrets."
