From Bankruptcy to Balance: How Ranil Wickremesinghe pulled Sri Lanka back from collapse

By mid-2022, Sri Lanka was not just in trouble. It was flat on the floor.

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A Country on its Knees (Mid-2022)

Fuel queues stretched for kilometers under the punishing sun. Mothers clutched ration books, hoping for a tin of powdered milk. Hospitals ran short of medicine. Power cuts lasted half the day. The nation had defaulted on its foreign debt for the first time in history, with over USD 51 billion in obligations it could no longer meet.

Reserves had withered to barely enough to cover a few weeks of imports. Inflation raced toward 70 percent, the rupee lost half its value in months, and the government openly admitted it could not even scrape together a million U.S. dollars for basic fuel shipments. In June 2022, then-Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe stood in Parliament and gave a speech that stunned even the most jaded lawmakers. “The economy has completely collapsed,” he declared, breaking with decades of political habit of sugarcoating disaster. By that point, he was the lone member of his party in Parliament—a political survivor many had written off. However, within weeks, when protestors stormed the presidential palace and forced Gotabaya Rajapaksa into exile, Wickremesinghe was elected president by Parliament. He inherited not a state in crisis, but a state in free fall. Few expected him to last the year.

Yet, over the next 26 months, he would drag Sri Lanka from bankruptcy toward stability—not through populism but through austerity, reform, and relentless diplomacy.

Firefighting in the Ruins (Late 2022)

The new president did not have a honeymoon period. The crisis was burning on every front. Fuel was gone, tourism had collapsed, exports were stalling, and social unrest threatened to ignite again.