{"id":47244,"date":"2015-08-22T12:49:44","date_gmt":"2015-08-22T19:49:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/?p=47244"},"modified":"2015-08-22T12:50:14","modified_gmt":"2015-08-22T19:50:14","slug":"maithri-loots-upfa","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/2015\/08\/22\/maithri-loots-upfa\/","title":{"rendered":"Maithri loots UPFA"},"content":{"rendered":"<h2 class=\"td-post-featured-image\"><span style=\"color: #0000ff;\"><em>Courtesy <a style=\"color: #0000ff;\" href=\"http:\/\/nation.lk\/online\/author\/thilinap\/\">The Nation<\/a> &#8211;<\/em><\/span><\/h2>\n<p>President Maithripala Sirisena consolidated his position as leader of the Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP) by appointing known loyalists to the slots allocated to the United People\u2019s Freedom Alliance (UPFA).\u00a0\u00a0 The list includes seven who had contested and lost at the recently concluded parliamentary elections.<\/p>\n<p>This comes in the aftermath of Sirisena\u2019s pre-election moves to trump the so-called Mahinda (Rajapaksa) Faction by removing the General Secretaries of both the SLFP and UPFA and replacing them with his backers.\u00a0 He is said to be behind the move to stop the SLFP\u2019s Central Committee from meeting via a court injunction. He later sacked suspected Mahinda-loyalists from the SLFP\u2019s Central Committee.<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"entry-thumb\" title=\"Sirisena\" src=\"http:\/\/nation.lk\/online\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/08\/Sirisena-640x400.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"640\" height=\"400\" \/><\/p>\n<p>President Sirisena also appointed several of these loyalists to a committee tasked to work out an agreement with the United National Party (UNP) to form a \u2018National Government\u2019.\u00a0 Almost simultaneously Sirisena moved to evict other \u2018Mahinda-loyalists\u2019 from the Executive Committee of the UPFA.<\/p>\n<p>These developments have effectively pruned the UPFA\u2019s strength from a \u2018results day\u2019 95 to just 9 (5 from the National Freedom Front, and 1 each from the Pivithuru Hela Urumaya, Mahajana Eksath Peramuna, Ceylon Workers Congress and the New Left Front).<br \/>\nThe fate of the other 74 (i.e. leaving out the 12 from the National List) including former president Mahinda Rajapaksa is uncertain since they could be stripped of membership in the SLFP and possibly their parliamentary seat.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Courtesy The Nation &#8211; President Maithripala Sirisena consolidated his position as leader of the Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP) by appointing known loyalists to the slots allocated to the United People\u2019s Freedom Alliance (UPFA).\u00a0\u00a0 The list includes seven who had contested and lost at the recently concluded parliamentary elections. This comes in the aftermath of [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-47244","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-forum"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47244","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=47244"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47244\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=47244"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=47244"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=47244"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}