I was surprised he went so easily. Now we find out he did not. It sounds like he pulled a Romney and thought he had it in the bag.

The defeat of the incumbent Sri Lankan president Mahinda Rajapaksa in the presidential election on Thursday was neither completely unexpected nor was inevitable, as the narrow victory of his opponent Maithripala Sirisena testifies. But its significance is nonetheless far-reaching.

What happened may not have the look of a classic ‘regime change’ – ‘color revolution’ as in Georgia or a coup as in Ukraine – because the transition adhered to democratic principles, but without doubt outside powers had got involved discreetly (without being visible) and choreographed the rebound of party politics in Sri Lanka.

The success of that unspoken enterprise will ultimately need to be measured in terms of the policies (and their sustainability) that the Sirisena government is likely to pursue in the coming period. Given that country’s complex external environment, the contradictions in its political economy and of course Sri Lanka’s robust democratic traditions, the best-laid plots by outsiders can go awry.

In a manner of speaking, after the decade-long Rajapaksa era, Sri Lanka is once again becoming a ‘normal’ country – a vivacious democracy that got brutalized in civil war, but refused to go under.

http://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2015/01/12/lankan-transition-resets-indian-ocean-politics-i.html