evidence: On September 22, 2024, the Sri Lankan election authority announced that Anura Kumara Dissanayake of the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP)-led National People’s Power (NPP) alliance won the presidential election. Dissanayake, who has been the leader of the left-wing JVP since 2014, defeated 37 other candidates, including the incumbent president Ranil Wickremesinghe of the United National Party (UNP) and his closest challenger Sajith Premadasa of the Samagi Jana Balawegaya. [...] The JVP or the People’s Liberation Front was founded in 1965 as a Marxist-Leninist revolutionary party. Led by Rohana Wijeweera (1943-1989), the party attempted two armed insurrections—in 1971 and again from 1987 to 1989—against what it perceived as an unjust, corrupt, and intractable system. Both uprisings were brutally suppressed, leading to thousands of deaths, including the assassination of Wijeweera.After 1989, the JVP renounced the armed struggle and entered the democratic political arena. The leader of the JVP before Dissanayake was Somawansa Amerasinghe (1943-2016), who rebuilt the party after its major leaders had been killed in the late 1980s. Dissanayake took forward the agenda of building a left-wing political party that advocated for socialist policies in the electoral and social arenas.