IIRC, Sri Lanka has been flipflopping between different presidents and parties over the last few years as the same economic hardship is hitting them as everywhere else, but even the “good” presidents are totally unwilling to resist IMF austerity, and even the most principled and well-intentioned communists just cannot get anything done if they aren’t willing to tell the World Bank to fuck off. I’m unsure whether this is a corruption/morality thing or if it’s because Sri Lanka genuinely is in such a shitty place that it would be provably worse for them to stop taking loans (i.e. they might be well and truly debt-trapped and only foreign help from China and friends could save them), because Sri Lanka has had such a complex history that I just haven’t had the time to look deeply into it with ~200 other countries also taking up my attention span.