Sri Lankan president's bid to stay uncertain as election starts

COLOMBO: Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa's bid for a third term hung in the balance as the country's election began on Thursday, with voters split between the "devil they know" and an upstart who has promised to root out corruption and political decay.

Rajapaksa won around 58 percent of the vote in the last election, surfing a wave of popularity that sprang from the 2009 defeat of Tamil Tiger separatists who had waged a crippling war against the government for 26 years.

Reminding voters of Rajapaksa's victory, state-controlled TV stations showed clips of Wednesday's attack in Paris by suspected Islamist militants at the offices of a satirical magazine and then switched to old footage of the Sri Lankan war.

"When we see these images we also remember the history of terrorism in Sri Lanka," the announcer said.

Although his popularity has waned, Rajapaksa called the election two years early, confident that the perennially fractured opposition would fail to find a credible challenger.

But he did not anticipate the emergence of Mithripala Sirisena, who quit as one of Rajapaksa's ministers and crossed to the other side to become the opposition's candidate in November, triggering a flood of defections from the government.

"It has been a big shock for the president," said a Western diplomat in Colombo, recalling Rajapaksa's campaign-trail plea to voters to back "the devil they know" rather than an "unknown angel".

Some 15 million people are eligible to vote in the election, which began shortly after dawn. A result is expected to emerge in the early hours of Friday.

With more than 25,000 local and about 70 foreign monitors set to observe the vote, the election commission has said it is confident the poll will be free and fair.

Nevertheless, rumours have been rife in Colombo that force may be used to keep Sirisena voters away, that the result will somehow be distorted or even that the military might be deployed if Rajapaksa looks set to lose.

A local observer group, the Centre for Monitoring Election Violence, said there had been "unparalleled misuse of state resources and media" by Rajapaksa's party and that police inaction had given free rein to election-related violence in which one person was killed and dozens were injured.