As predicted by our political editor, President Mahinda Rajapaksa has opted to call for an early Presidential election ahead of scheduled Parliamentary elections.

President Rajapaksa deserves credit for his unequivocal statement this week to national editors and publishers that he would, by virtue of calling early elections, sacrifice two years of his first term. This would seemingly be the case based on the Supreme Court judgment that took away a year from President Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga's tenure of office -- the beneficiary of which turned out to be President Rajapaksa himself.

It is not that President Rajapaksa has done anything extraordinary, but in Sri Lanka's context when governments since 1975 had done their utmost to gerrymander with the Constitution and the mandate of the people to buy a year or two in office, the pronouncement of President Rajapaksa is indeed extraordinary.

President Rajapaksa having the option to continue until 2011 will now forgo the balance two years of his first term. He cannot, should he be re-elected have an eight-year second term (till November 2017) on the basis that he was first elected in 2005.

Constitutional theorists raised the question that if President Rajapaksa was entitled to such an extended term, would his opponent, should he win, be entitled to the same? Neither would it be democratic nor in the spirit of the Constitution. Fortunately President Rajapaksa himself has put the issue to rest and whoever is elected at the January 26 Presidential election will have his term run only till January 2016. The constant fear, of course, is what could happen after the election; whether the country will see the consolidation of a de-facto dictatorship or the advent of a de-jure dictatorship.

The Executive Presidency has become the focus once again of all the political parties. Hypocrisy and opportunism, the twin evils of most politicians and political parties, are oozing out of every pore. It is almost funny, if it were not so tragic, that current politicians from both sides of the divide support and oppose the Executive Presidency churning out exactly the opposite arguments of what they were saying not long ago.

No incumbent wishes away the Executive Presidency. We were told that the Executive Presidency was introduced to ensure strength and stability in governance, but over the years, it has turned into something else. As far as stability is concerned it has brought down governments and parliaments, as happened in 2004. The very announcement of early Presidential elections this week, when elections are not due, further illustrates the point that a Presidential system is no guarantee for stability in the government.

As for strengthening governments, the Executive Presidency has not encouraged the strengthening of institutions -- the judiciary, the public service, the education service, the police service, the elections commission etc. It instead made itself, the centre of gravity -- the fountain from which all power gushed.

It was meant for the head of government (the President) to be insulated from the vagaries of fragile Parliaments, but instead Parliament has been converted to merely rubber stamping Presidential decrees including public-finance policy.

As we have said so many times Parliament Oversight Committees, open to the public through the media, are a sine qua non for good governance, like in the US. Abraham Lincoln's famous quote that democracy is "the government of the people, by the people, for the people" must have a new addition -- through the people.

If the people are to be genuine stakeholders of a worthy democracy, they must be made active participants in the governing process.

President Rajapaksa was not particularly convincing about political reforms to strengthen Parliament. His reasoning for supporting an Executive Presidency over what he called "a Parliament purchasable by foreign powers" is farfetched to say the least.

Elections are not the be all and end all of democracy, especially when elections are flawed or blatantly rigged as has been the case more often than not in recent Sri Lanka. The mere holding of elections is not an indicator of democracy.

While old and advanced democracies have made their countries and governance more participatory of the people (voters), new democracies like Nepal are looking for ways and means to make elected leaders more accountable. Bhutan, for instance, is considering what it calls "the right of recall" -- to review the role of an elected legislator in mid-term.

The opposition has found the Executive Presidency a face-saving device, a rallying point for political forces that would have found it embarrassing to join hands on other issues. There is no better defender of the Executive Presidency than the government whose members will no doubt be the first on the streets demanding its dismantling should they be defeated.

There is no magic in the Executive Prime Minister either as we have seen particularly from 1970-1977 and a tyrannical Parliament could be as equally oppressive as an Executive Presidency.

We have so often quoted the famous poet Alexander Pope,"For forms of government let fools contest (no pun intended). Whatever is best administered is best". In the final reckoning, the prime-ministerial system is more democratic than the Executive Presidency for at least the Prime Minister stands accountable to Parliament.

Overall though, there is no better way to sustain a democracy than to ensure the strengthening of the institutions on which it rests, as mentioned before. If only the campaigners took this as their prime objective in the weeks ahead, the country's interests and that of its people would be better served.