evidence: Sri Lanka elected Anura Kumara Dissanayake as its new president on September 21, marking the first time in the country’s history that a candidate outside the two major political parties has won the presidency. Dissanayake, representing the National People’s Power (NPP) coalition, defeated candidates from the long-dominant United National Party (UNP) and Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP). The election comes as Sri Lanka continues to grapple with economic challenges following its 2022 debt default. In an interview with JURIST Senior Editor for Long Form Content Pitasanna Shanmugathas, researcher Balasingham Skanthakumar, a member of the Social Scientists’ Association of Sri Lanka and the editor of the Colombo-based Polity magazine, discusses the implications of this political shift for the South Asian nation [...] Balasingham Skanthakumar: Anura Kumara Dissanayake’s victory as the candidate of the center-left National People’s Power (NPP) coalition is highly significant for symbolic and substantive reasons. His predecessors have been from the social and political elite that has mis-ruled Sri Lanka since independence from Britain in 1948. Some were born into that elite, while a couple (Ranasinghe Premadasa, Maithripala Sirisena) made their way into it through the business of politics before they occupied the presidency. In contrast, Dissanayaka’s political life has been as an outsider and critic of that elite.