Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapakse has won a second term in office, after a bitterly fought campaign marred by violence. His rival Sarath Fonseka says he’ll challenge the result in court but now faces arrest for his role in stirring up unrest.

Mr Rajapakse secured a massive majority over his rival, the former army chief Sarath Fonseka, with a lead of more than 1.5million votes, according to government officials. He has promised to stabilise Sri Lanka after last year’s bloody defeat of the Tamil insurgency, which the UN says claimed the lives of up to 100,000 people.

Today troops surrounded Mr Fonseka’s luxury hotel in the capital Colombo but the government claims the measure is for his own protection.

Listen to an interview with Sri Lanka expert Bart Klem

Sri Lanka analyst Bart Klem told RNW: “It’s very obvious Fonseka and his supporters aren’t very happy about it.”

Flawed election

Observers say the electoral process was violated from the very beginning and there were more than 1,000 reports of violence in the run-up to Tuesday’s ballot. President Rajapakse has promised to stabilise the country and rebuild its shattered economy, but Bart Klem says it’s unlikely anything will change:

“So far, the willingness of the government to introduce serious political reforms to really look at the country at large… have been very limited. The President has been aloof of reaching out to minorities in a serious political way. Of course he’s been talking about reconciliation and stabilisation… but there’s a very strong feeling that the peace he’s proposing is primarily a singular peace.”

Fractured opposition

Sarath Fonseka was supported by a wide range of different groups in Sri Lanka, and last week secured the backing of a key Tamil party, the Tamil National Alliance. Bert Klem says:

“Fonseka was the candidate that united all the people that were unhappy about the present President, and that included some of the Tamil minority, some of the Muslims…. So it was really a very diverse crowd backing him, so you might say he was a chance of uniting all that. But the chances of that being a success were not terribly high.”