Editorial

It is now possible for this country to engage in some ‘capacity building’ on how to hold elections in some other countries where public hatred, extremism and violence of far-right movements and assassination attempts on candidates prevail, as opposed to Sri Lanka, where public discipline was very high and a dignified handover took place.

We said last week that whoever won the election, democracy was the ultimate winner. It was Sir Winston Churchill, though deeply ambivalent about democracy and elections (having won a world war but lost an election), who said the best argument against democracy was a five-minute conversation with an average voter. “But,” he added, “Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all other forms tried from time to time.” This must surely resonate with President Ranil Wickremesinghe, who, like Churchill then, was yanked out of the ‘blues’ to pull their nation out of deep trouble, which they both successfully did, only to be defeated at a subsequent election.

President Anura Kumara Dissanayake, the Ninth Executive President, is the first to be propelled to the office with a handicap of the popular mandate. He conceded that the majority did not vote for him last Saturday but that he would nevertheless treat all alike.

The new president has admitted that the popular uprising of 2022 (the Aragalaya) was what gave his party the momentum to upstage the parliamentary opposition and become the main opposition in the country. They played a shrewd game of fanning the uprising; they were the hidden hand that gave the push for street protests of various unions, but they were rarely seen in the forefront. When the vociferous student unions that faced the brunt of the police water cannons put forward their candidate for the presidency on the basis of the role they played, he came 11th. The JVP/NPP, it was, that took the winner’s cup.

The worries about the President and his party’s policies came from those entertaining existential angsts that he would be a modern-day Robin Hood, straitjacketed in outdated Marxist ideology. While campaigning, he tried to allay those fears, saying the party has changed as has the world, though some of his comrades were still singing from the same old party hymn sheet of revenge and vengeance against the capitalist classes.

This dread was not only local. Foreign nations were studying this new popular wave and trying to make friends with the party. Many of them are still not convinced there has been a sea change and a notable transformation of its worldview. Western nations don’t take kindly to Marxist-inclined governments, especially when the ruling party flies the hammer and sickle flag in front of its headquarters. These nations after all ‘own’ the IMF and World Bank, and Sri Lanka’s trade and investment are tied to these nations.

Much of the new president’s focus will therefore have to be on the external front. He is fortunate in a sense that his predecessor has left him a somewhat stabilised economy, not the disaster it was in 2022. These successes in economic recovery did not impress the local voter. For many, the threshold of pain and suffocation from the reforms that had to be implemented was very low, and they expect quick results to a life of relative normalcy, but the new leadership of the country cannot pretend they are not issues of some magnitude yet to be resolved. An IMF team arrives in the country tomorrow to discuss its bailout scheme with the new government. The all-important debt restructuring exercise remains a ‘work in progress’.

On the diplomatic front, the outgoing government was able to balance two regional powerhouses with utmost aplomb and skill, while at the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva, it obtained some breathing space for the new administration to get its act together.

On the political front at home, the combined vote of the 2nd and 3rd candidates outscoring the winner’s tally has been the subject of discussion among the vanquished all this week. The victor couldn’t clear the magical 50 percent hurdle to win on the first count because he had to share the anti-incumbency vote. On the other hand, the anti-JVP/NPP vote got split three ways, benefiting the ultimate victor, and each of the camps on the losing side blames the other for dividing that vote. That is all spilt milk now.

In France recently, when the Far Right won the first round of elections, its splintered opponents, despite their differences, rallied together to reset that verdict. By uniting, they defeated the Far Right in the second and final round. The parliamentary election is the second round in Sri Lanka. Without a victory at that hustings and without a parliamentary majority, the President will be a lame duck. If his party is going to abolish the Executive Presidency as it has promised to do, it makes their position even more untenable in governance.

For now, to the winner go the fruits of victory. The NPP/JVP victory coincides with the UN ‘Summit of the Future: Multilateral Solutions for a Better Tomorrow’. While the new government, unaccustomed to power and place, finds its feet, they will know that time is not exactly on their side. They have escaped parliamentary scrutiny by dissolving Parliament.

If they came to power on the shoulders of agitators, the boot is now on the other foot. Their voters expect them to ‘walk the talk’, and soon. A pithy local idiom “l;dj foda,dfjka .uk mhska” (the talk is by palanquin but the walk is by foot) will reverberate if they don’t deliver from a demanding electorate. It will be their turn to be at the receiving end of criticism.

They have to only look back to the bad old days of not so long ago—and the 2019 mandate of President Gotabaya Rajapaksa; the euphoria that welcomed his new regime; the firecrackers and milk rice distributed—all to end up in a puff of smoke before his term could be even half completed.