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Pallewatte Gamaralalage Maithripala Yapa Sirisena is a Sri Lankan politician and the 7th and current President of Sri Lanka, in office since January 2015. Sirisena joined mainstream politics in 1989 as a member of the Parliament of Sri Lanka and has held several ministries since 1994. He was the general-secretary of the Sri Lanka Freedom Party and was Minister of Health until November 2014 when he announced his candidacy for the 2015 presidential election as the opposition coalition's common candidate. His victory in the election is generally viewed as a surprise, coming to office through the votes won from the alternative Sinhala-majority rural constituency and the Tamil and Muslim minority groups that have been alienated by the Rajapaksa government on post-war reconciliation and growing sectarian violence. Their votes were more anti-Rajapaksa than pro-Sirisena. Maithripala Sirisena pledged to implement a 100-day reform program where he promised to rebalance the executive branch, reinforce Sri Lanka's judiciary and parliament, fight corruption,investigate allegations of war crimes from 2009, repeal the controversial eighteenth amendment, re-instate the seventeenth amendment and appoint UNP leader Ranil Wickremesinghe as Prime Minister. He later was reported to have publicly disavowed this program, claiming that he did not know where it originated. In 2018, Sirisena fired Wickremesinghe, dissolved Parliament and appointed the former President Mahinda Rajapaksa as the Prime Minister, in apparent contradiction to the Constitution of Sri Lanka. This marks Sirisena's second, and most successful attempt to bring Rajapaksa to power.
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