Sri Lanka's Dissanayake and Premadasa head to presidential race runoff

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00:00Let's get the latest in elections in Sri Lanka now. The leftist candidate Aruna Desanayake has

00:05secured an early lead. Sri Lanka's election commission says the Marxist-leaning leader

00:11has garnered 53% of the 1 million votes counted so far. The incumbent Ranil Vikaram Singh here

00:18is currently in third place. If Desanayake reaches the 50% threshold of all votes,

00:24he would make history as the first leftist leader in the island nation. Our correspondent

00:29Sarah Jacobs is covering the elections for us from New Delhi. Well polling wound up at 4 pm

00:36on Saturday and counting has been well and truly underway for a couple of hours by now

00:41and going by the early leads, the NPP leader, that's the National People's Power leader Aruna

00:48Kumara Desanayake seems set to be victorious in this election. Now according to the election

00:56commission, Saturday's election was the most peaceful in this island nation's electoral history

01:03and as of now Desanayake, the 55-year-old candidate who presented himself as a candidate

01:11of change seems set to also go down in the history books by possibly becoming this debt-ridden

01:18nation's first Marxist candidate. He is seems set to be the next and ninth executive president

01:27of Sri Lanka. Now while Desanayake's party only has three seats in parliament, his popularity

01:35surged during the campaign. He's known for making fiery speeches and his speeches were full of

01:40promises of cracking down on corruption of pro-poor policies but clearly seem to have resonated with

01:47the average Sri Lankan who had been badly hit by the economic collapse of 2022 because

01:55Mr Desanayake seems to be set to be in the lead at least among the votes that have been counted so far.

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