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Podcast: Global Dispatches -- World News That Matters
Episode: Sri Lanka Shows How to Oust a Corrupt Authoritarian Regime and Stop Democratic Backsliding
Description: For the past two decades, Sri Lankan politics has been dominated by the Rajapaksa family, with two brothers more or less alternating between serving as president and prime minister from 2005 to 2022. Their regime was marked by corruption and sustained through appeals to ethnic nationalism among the majority Sinhalese Buddhist population, including by deliberately inciting sentiment against minority Muslim and Tamil communities. This kind of appeal to nationalism was the dominant force in Sri Lankan politics for most of the last 20 years — until, that is, the elections this fall. In presidential and then parliamentary elections, a new coalition ca...