Ranil Wickramasinghe, who has served as Sri Lanka’s prime minister five times before, was re-elected yesterday to succeed Mahinda Rajapakse.

While Gotabya Rajapakse remains President, the blueprint of the arrangement seems, by all accounts, to be positive, with the President consenting to the requests illustrated by the resistance, in particular:

We are in full agreement with these measures and trust that Mr. Wickramasinghe will be able to steer Sri Lanka out of this mess on both the international and domestic levels. A tentative first step in that direction can be seen in these developments.