Sunday Times 2
Among those present…
View(s):I read with great interest that President Ranil Wickremesinghe was exhorting his party faithful at the recent UNP convention to prepare for elections in 2024.
The president, a well-read veteran with an enviable knowledge of parliamentary procedure and electoral law, stated that according to our current constitution, the presidential election would be held next year, followed by parliamentary elections in early 2025.
Now this begs an obvious question.
According to our current constitution, a presidential election must be held before the end of 2024, but what if the constitution is amended before then by the reluctant parliamentary majority that is beholden to Ranil? Surely they would want to hang on to their lucrative jobs rather than face the wrath of the voters? What if they get together to delay elections by amending the constitution?
What will happen, on the other hand, if Ranil decides (like Uncle JR) to bypass normal elections and go for a referendum to extend his presidency?
Ranil, they say, is a great believer (like the famous British politician Lord Butler) in The Art of the Possible—the understanding born of experience that political survival is not a matter of idealism but of pragmatism. Like ‘Rab’ Butler (and unlike many of Ranil’s political colleagues), our president is a person who does not need to make money out of political office. He has the financial freedom to pursue his political career, despite his obvious lack of people skills.
What if Ranil does decide to hold a presidential election next year? Who will he have to challenge him for the people’s mandate?
Looking around at the likely starters in the next presidential race, I must confess that we citizens are distinctly underwhelmed by the talents and capabilities of Ranil’s possible rivals.
Among those present, I see nothing but a bunch of mediocrities—professional politicians lacking depth and substance, people whose vision does not extend beyond their immediate goal of getting re-elected and staying in office as long as possible.
Consider young Sajith—the poor man forever appears to be trying to prove himself, struggling to show that he is worthy to wear the mantle of his famous father. He regularly embellishes his lack of depth with words of learned length and thundering sound, which might (or might not) amaze the gazing rustics gathered around him. But can he hold his own on his own—without having around him Harsha, Eran and Kabir, his triumvirate of older and wiser ‘support kaarayas’?
The other man who has already thrown his hat into the ring is Maithripala Sirisena, who is now about as useful to this country as a hip pocket on a pair of underpants. Maithripala had the presidency thrust upon him in 2015 simply because he was the right person in the right place at the right time to undercut his master Mahinda Rajapakse over a meal of egg hoppers. In July this year, announcing his intent to run once more for president with a pathetic, half-hearted apology to this country’s Catholics for his negligence in allowing the Easter Sunday bombings to take place during his watch, Maithripala declared his intent to be “like Nelson Mandela.” What visions of grandeur!
Who else do we have on the short list from which to select our next head of state? I do hope none of the Rajapaksa brothers decides to come forward. Mahinda, a man endowed with more PR skills and native shrewdness than all the rest of them, has more than achieved his aim of resurrecting the fallen fortunes of the Rajapaksa family. However, after no less a body than the Supreme Court rightly ruled this month that the Rajapaksa brothers were guilty of violating public trust and causing last year’s economic crisis, the brothers should, if they had any self-respect, gracefully retire from public life. Perhaps that is too much to hope for, given the ambitions of the family and the short memories of our people.
The other candidate who has declared himself ready to contest is populist JVP Comrade Anura Kumara, who appears to be intent on taking our country back to an idealistic agrarian utopia based on autarky. A visionary whose vision is as wide as that of a horse wearing blinkers, he and his party are trying to introduce Marxism and communism to our country even after Marxism and communism have long been abandoned in the Soviet Union and China. He can talk well, but can he work well?
Perhaps we should look with trepidation at what happened in Argentina last Sunday when the people elected a relatively inexperienced economist, Javier Millei (nicknamed El Loco or The Madman), as their new president.
With his political experience limited to just two years as a member of parliament and no previous experience as a minister or governor, this man with radical ideas appeared to be the answer for millions of Argentinians who recognised their country had been economically mismanaged and run to the ground by a series of politicians from both sides. Like Sri Lanka, Argentina has experienced soaring inflation, with many people struggling to make ends meet. Millei’s railing against the traditional political parties (he calls them “robbers who take money out of voters’ pockets”) resonated with Argentinians who had endured years of government by the two main political blocs, the Conservatives and the Peronists. Just as in our country, where we reject the Greens and elect the Blues—and then, after a few years, reject the Blues and elect the Greens—the voters of Argentina appeared to decide that enough was enough. They realised there was no solution to be had by electing a leader from among those present, so they thrust into office a rank outsider.
If we have an election next year, will we vote for one of the challengers who can make better speeches than Ranil and sway voters with their oratory, or will we select old Ranil, the least objectionable of those present?
Or will we, like the disgruntled voters of Argentina, look for a radical outsider like El Loco ‘The Madman’, to take a chainsaw to those miscreants who have destroyed our economy?