Colombo  - The ruling coalition convincingly won a southern provincial election on the weekend, largely due to the government's popularity for crushing the Tamil rebels earlier this year.

The United People's Freedom Alliance (UPFA) secured 67.88 per cent of the vote, while main opposition United National Party (UNP) won 25.09 per cent in an election where 67 per cent of the 1.7 million registered voters turned up for polling.

President Mahinda Rajapaksa had called on voters to endorse the war victory at the ballot box and be vigilant to not allow the rebels of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) to rise again.

Defence Secretary Gotabhaya Rajapaksa, the president's brother, said before the polls that Tamil rebels still have influence locally and internationally.

The UPFA took 38 seats on the legislative council, against the 36 it won in the previous 2004 election. The opposition UNP secured 14 seats, compared with the 19 seats it won five years earlier.

Rajapaksa has so far held seven provincial elections since last year and won all of them. Elections are due for the northern province which was brought under the full control of the army this year.

Parliamentary elections are due before April next year, but Rajapaksa is also considering calling a presidential election as well, before his full six-year term ends in 2012.

"There is some thought that we should go for a presidential election first and others say the parliamentary elections should be held first. We have not decided on it," Rajapaksa told journalists after voting on Saturday.

The popularity of opposition UNP has flagged since Rajapaksa militarily defeated the LTTE to end the 26-year war. The UNP is led by former prime minister Ranil Wickremesinghe, who was the architect of a failed Norwegian-backed peace deal in 2002 aimed at ending the ethnic minority conflict. (dpa)