COLOMBO: A day after being sworn into the position of president, Ranil Wickremesinghe nominated veteran politician and close Rajapaksa family ally Dinesh Gunawardena as Sri Lanka's prime minister on Friday. President Wickremesinghe made this appointment on his first official day in office.

Gunawardena, 73, a political mainstay in Sri Lanka, formerly held the positions of foreign minister and minister of education. At the time, President Gotabaya Rajapaksa appointed him to the position of Home Minister in April.

The Prime Minister's position fell vacant after Wickremesinghe, 73, was on Thursday sworn in as the country's 8th  president after Gotabaya Rajapaksa fled the country and then quit as president. President Wickremesinghe's former classmate Gunawardena has previously served in a number of Cabinet positions.

Gunawardena, who was born in 1949, is the head of the Trotskyist majority nationalist Mahajana Eksath Peramuna (MEP), a member of the SLPP. In 1979, he took over as party leader from his father Philip Gunawardena after returning from the Netherlands, where he finished his college education.

Prior to the nation's independence in 1948 from Great Britain, his father was a well-known member of the Marxist socialist movement. In 1956, the MEP seized control of the government. From the populated Colombo neighbourhood of Maharagama, Gunawardena initially entered parliament in 1983 and rose to prominence in the opposition until 1994.

In 2000, he was appointed as a Cabinet minister for the first time. Up to 2015, he held senior Cabinet roles.

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