Editorial

A crucial election (all elections are considered crucial) negotiates the bend, with a week to go for V-Day (Voting Day). Everyone wants an election in haste often to repent later.

The last presidential election in 2019 was a textbook example of the pre-election hype of large crowds at public meetings, meetings of businessmen and professionals, workers abroad returning to vote, and then everything evaporating in next to no time: the country plunging into an unprecedented economic abyss.

An entire bunch of candidates is in the fray this time—many for their personal aggrandisement or as a trial run for future reference. The frontrunners are predicting stonking victories for their candidates. Social media is awash with opinion polls. Unlike in all previous presidential elections, this time it is not a straight contest between the incumbent (Government) and the Opposition. A third force has emerged, splitting the opposition vote, but in the process, political parties have split like amoeba.

No longer are Sri Lankan voting patterns calcified into political parties. No longer is the electorate rigidly partisan in their allegiance to the two main parties of the past, the UNP and the SLFP. These are now out of contention. Even in the North, there is no monolith party, and the Left parties are all over the place. Votes are therefore going to get so scattered that a winner is difficult to predict. The only certainty seems to be that no candidate is likely to win outright in the first round of counting.

The incumbent President Ranil Wickremesinghe, vilified by the Opposition as someone who won a ‘sweep ticket’, might say he was the only one willing to purchase that sweep ticket to save the country. He is banking on his performance of yanking the nation out of the economic depths it had fallen into only two years ago. His symbol is a reminder of those dark days—and nights—of not so long ago. His achievements were best articulated this week in Geneva before the world community at the UN Human Rights Council.

They were told that the fragile but solidly grounded economic stability and the completion of debt restructuring have led to improved economic indicators, including a remarkable return to positive economic growth of 5.3% in the first quarter of 2024, currency appreciation, a tripling of remittances, strengthened foreign exchange reserves, and a reduction in inflation from 70% in September 2022 to 1.7% by June 2024. Clearly, the transition from a debt-driven economic crisis in 2022 towards stabilisation and growth involves budgetary restrictions, which cause adverse short-term impacts on society. These are unavoidable consequences from what was a knock-out blow to the economy in 2022—not unique to Sri Lanka, but the country came out of it unlike many other nations still struggling to recover.

However, these difficulties the people face, having to tighten their belts to the point of suffocation, are what the other candidates are using as their platform to the President’s House. They contend that they have different options and different strategies to reset the country on the right economic path. Some go to the extent of saying they will lay down conditions to the IMF—the borrower laying conditions to the lender! The President’s inability or unwillingness to tackle corruption issues because of his reliance on the SLPP for his parliamentary majority is what is held against him the most.

One of the President’s challengers is the Opposition Leader, Sajith Premadasa, who broke away from the UNP, inflicting mortal wounds on what was widely referred to as the ‘Grand Old Party’. It split the UNP vote in 2019 and has caused the party that ushered in independence in 1948 to be a bystander at the forthcoming polls, unable to provide its leader, the President, the necessary support for his victory. Supporters of Mr. Premadasa say he has the ‘best team’ of parliamentarians who have held office before and have a definitive plan for the future of the country. Some of his team members come with baggage of a very high order, cross-overs from other parties, hanging on to him for Cabinet portfolios should he win. He himself is campaigning on the grounds that he is a no-nonsense leader in the footsteps of his father, President R. Premadasa, and wants the country to correct what he would believe was their mistake in defeating him at the 2019 presidential election.

As for the ‘best team’, the JVP/NPP leader A.K.D. Dissanayake also lays claim to this. He must stress that line because he has only three MPs and few frontline members known to the public. There is a large amount of gnawing angst about the party given its history of involvement in two putsches in 1971 and 1987/89 that saw bloodshed and destruction of state property. The JVP recognised that the ghosts of the past were haunting them and impeding their forward march electorally, so they did the wise thing of getting a new name and new symbol for themselves, viz., the NPP and the compass. They have been at pains to say they have converted to a social-democratic party from a revolutionary one and have succeeded in winning the support of the downtrodden whom they say they identify with more than the others do. Fortunately for them, those under 40 have no experience of that era of violence. They want the people not to fear them and to “give them a chance”.

Campaigning and governing, as all politicians and the country know, are two separate entities. Masses are often easily malleable, swayed by campaign rhetoric and promises, only to find it is all a pipe dream. The higher the hopes, the higher the expectations; the sooner they get dashed. The British Donoughmore Commission, when granting universal adult franchise to Ceylon in 1931, did so “not without reluctance,” in its own words, to allow those with no educational qualifications to vote. All that is now passe, and it is one citizen, one vote.

A former Elections Commissioner advised voters, when going to their polling booths next Saturday, to take two things with them: their National Identity Cards and their brains. Vote wisely.