COLOMBO ELECTION RESULTS
COLOMBC, Feb. 1 -- The capture of seats by rightist parties in recent municipal elections here has been pictured in the capitalist press as a crushirig defeat for the left, including the Lanka Sama Samaja party, Ceylon section of the Fourth International. The UNP, a right-wing bourgeois party, won forty seats against three for the LSSP, one for the Communist perty, one for the government party (the leftbourgeois LSFP), and three for various independents.
(The three candidates of the LSSP who were elected were comrades Bernard Soysa, who is a member of the LSSP Political Bureau, Vivienne Gunawardene and Ananda Premasinghe: )
However, tabulation of the votes shows that the truth was somewhat different from the picture presented by the big press. In most constituencies, only two candidates ran in opposition to each other, so that evr comrades won a much higher proportion of votes than they “did of seats.
In eighteen wards where a straight contest occurred between the UNP end the LSSP, the Trotskyists polled 22,704 votes against 29,093 for the capitalist candidates. In thirty-two wards where LSSP and Communist party candiddtes united their forces, they nolled 40,187 votes against 56,04%3.for the UNP.
However, as is confirmed by other local election resu-ts, it. is clear that a definite swing to the right is taking place in Ceylon. During the first part of the SLFP government's’ tenure in office, our Ceylonese comrades failed to differentiate themselves sufficiently. from the government. This resulted in the UNP appearing as the main opposition force and it was able to cash i en tre ee es anone
- seois layers that was arouse y the corruption, Lae Bin menue = and ynf ation that has characterized the SLFP repime.