The Aragalaya Protest Movement and the Struggle for Political Change in Sri Lanka

David G. Timberman

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From early 2022 to late 2024, Sri Lanka went through an intermittent, uncertain, but ultimately momentous change in its political leadership. In early 2022, in response to a severe economic crisis, massive protests forced from office then president Gotabaya Rajapaksa and other members of the powerful Rajapaksa political dynasty. He was succeeded by Ranil Wickremesinghe, another member of the discredited political elite, who held office for the next two years. In late 2024, new elections brought to power a leader and political party that had been long opposed to the country’s traditional political and economic elites. Sri Lanka’s political transition is notable both because it is a rare democratic success story in an era marked by democratic backsliding around the world and because it highlights the potency, though also some of the inadequacies, of political protest movements.

The 2024 elections, won by Anura Kumara Dissanayake and the National People’s Power (NPP) coalition, represent a dramatic repudiation by Sri Lankan voters of the country’s deeply entrenched political establishment. While it was the electoral process in 2024 that ultimately resulted in the rejection of the government headed by Wickremesinghe, it was the Aragalaya (Sinhala for “struggle”) protest movement during the first half of 2022 that dealt the initial body blow to Sri Lanka’s political establishment by demanding the resignation of Gotabaya Rajapaksa and other members of the political elite and calling for fundamental changes to the country’s political system (what protesters called “system change”). In just four months—between March and July 2022—the Aragalaya movement succeeded in forcing from office first prime minister and former president Mahinda Rajapaksa (the president’s brother) and then president Gotabaya Rajapaksa himself.1

In the wake of these resignations, Ranil Wickremesinghe, a prominent member of Sri Lanka’s political elite, first was appointed by Gotabaya Rajapaksa as prime minister and then was selected by Parliament to succeed him as president.2 Wickremesinghe’s ascendancy to the presidency (technically called the “executive presidency”) was an adept political feat made possible by the political disarray created by Aragalaya as well as the close-knit nature of Sri Lanka’s political elite. As soon as Wickremesinghe came to power, he repressed the protests, arrested protesters, and refused to hold local elections that almost certainly would have weakened his political position.