In that council, the UPFA won more than two-thirds of the seats, with 72% percent of the vote.

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President Mahinda Rajapaksa's UPFA party has enough seats for the move to succeed, but the process could take months.

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Although the technical membership of the UPFA may now be approaching the bare minimum of legislators needed to maintain a majority in the 225-seat parliament, the government is likely to be able to find a comfortable number of MPs to back its legislative agenda from among the numerous smaller parties in Sri Lanka.

ECONOMIST: Wobbly Sri Lanka | The

Such is the current fluidity of the political scene, however, that it is not immediately clear whether the CWC's defection is definitive, or whether the incident is simply a temporary falling-out of the kind that is all too likely given the fractious and increasingly unwieldy state of the ruling United People's Freedom Alliance (UPFA) coalition.

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