The swearing-in of Anura Kumara Dissanayake as Sri Lanka’s new elected President on September 23, 2024, marks a new beginning of historical significance. It symbolises a dramatic shift in the class bases of political power — from a privileged minority of Colombo-centric, westernised elites to a broad coalition of non-elite social forces. If Sri Lanka’s electoral democracy since its independence in 1948 had guaranteed the dominant elites unbroken continuity in political power, it has now produced a break with the past; a moment of the magic that democracy and free and fair elections can occasionally produce.
Significantly, the election outcome also marks a peaceful and bloodless transfer of power. The new President obtained his popular mandate with the promise of overhauling a corrupt and rotten system of government that had remained the birth right of the privileged social classes for nearly seven decades. The class monopoly of political power that has been institutionalised through democracy has now been ruptured by the demos themselves.
Transition and political rise
The National People’s Power (NPP), the political movement which Sri Lanka’s new President leads, has a short but transformative history. It was formed in 2019 as an electoral front of the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP-People’s Liberation Front) with a moderate and centrist reform ideology. Mr. Dissanayake was the NPP’s presidential candidate in that year. Until 2019, he was leading the JVP. The JVP had been formed in the 1960s, which was the period of the New Left throughout the world. The JVP emerged as a Left radical underground movement with a commitment to armed struggle to establish a South Asian version of revolutionary socialism. Parallel to similar radical movements in other parts of South Asia, the JVP’s early ideology and political programme was influenced by Marxism and Maoism.
The JVP tried out two armed insurrections in 1971 and 1987-89. After the costly defeat in the last armed struggle, a new generation of JVP leaders, who abandoned the goal of socialism through the armed struggle, transformed the JVP into a parliamentary party. Mr. Dissanayake belongs to this new band of ‘JVP-ers’ committed at the time to the goal of socialism through electoral and parliamentary politics.
The JVP’s transition to democratic politics did not bring much success in terms of parliamentary seats. In most instances, it remained a small opposition party. Its experiments with forming electoral alliances with the two main parties, the Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP) and United National Party (UNP), did not enable the JVP to secure its goal of being a ‘third force’ in Sri Lanka’s dominant two-party system. The formation of a socially broad-based and ideologically non-dogmatic NPP in 2019 was the JVP leadership’s response to this political deadlock it repeatedly encountered.
Despite the NPP’s participation in the presidential election in 2019 and parliamentary elections in 2020, it could secure only a little over 3% of votes and three parliamentary seats.
Catalysed by two developments
The NPP’s rapid rise to become a major political force, weakening the traditional UNP and SLPP, and successfully making claims to be the new ruling party in 2024 is a direct outcome of two developments. The first is the economic crisis exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020. The second is the deep social and political crisis that exploded as the Aragalaya or the citizens’ protest movement, of 2022.
Meanwhile, the management of the debt crisis since 2023 by the Sri Lankan government, by means of a harsh austerity programme as prescribed by the International Monetary Fund, created widespread social discontent and anger against the Ranil Wickremesinghe administration. People saw the new tax policies and the dismantling of the welfare programmes as policy measures that benefited the rich and the wealthy business classes while exacerbating the crisis of the economic survival of the poor and the middle classes.
Growing poverty, income inequalities and increasing social polarisation between the haves and have-nots have generated a clear shift in the people’s political loyalties— away from the traditional elite parties. It is in this context that the NPP’s reform proposals for a corruption-free and pro-poor government could secure a positive response in urban and rural electoral constituencies.
The political space for Mr. Dissanayake and the NPP to have emerged as a leading reformist political force so rapidly within two years had already been created by the Aragalaya. Its powerful slogan of ‘system change’ and the hopes it envisioned for a new generation of politicians, committed to eliminating corruption, cronyism and tyrannical government, fitted perfectly well with the NPP’s agenda of reforming Sri Lanka’s politics, political culture and practices of governance. Thus, Mr. Dissanayake’s victory is a slightly delayed political outcome of the Aragalaya.
The NPP’s rapid journey to become Sri Lanka’s newest ruling party has also coincided with the consolidation of the Samagi Jana Balawegaya (SJB-Unified People’s Force) as the leading opposition party. The combined presence of the NPP and the SJB in Sri Lanka’s parliamentary and electoral politics signals the onset of a major transformation of Sri Lanka’s political party system as well. The UNP, SLFP and the Sri Lanka Podujana Peramuna (SLPP), the three main political parties founded and managed by the political class of Sri Lankan elites, have been so weakened that they can remain only as small opposition parties.
Thus, the emerging frame of political polarisation in Sri Lanka appears to be between the NPP and SJB — the SJB filling the space for a right-wing party caused by the decline of the UNP as a mass party.
Getting down to business will not be easy
The new President will have a set of unusual challenges and tasks before him. Since he has only three Members of Parliament in Parliament, holding early parliamentary elections is a major imperative for the new President. To form his own government, the President is likely to form a caretaker cabinet. Headed by the President, the caretaker cabinet will have three other Ministers. The dissolution of Parliament is most likely to occur before or next week so that an election can be held ideally in late-November.
To consolidate his government, the new President will need a comfortable parliamentary majority, of over 113 MPs. The presidential election has clearly exposed a major lacunae in his electoral base. The NPP has a rather weak presence in the districts with sizeable Tamil and Muslim ethnic minorities. The fact that Mr. Dissanayake’s victory has been ensured primarily by Sinhalese voters is an issue that demands early corrective action. Making the NPP ethnically pluralistic will enable the NPP government to be inclusivist of all of Sri Lanka’s ethnic and cultural communities, while also securing a clear parliamentary majority.
Two other tasks will test the resolve and capacities of the new President and his government. The first is about repaying the external debt while taking the country’s economy back to the path of rapid growth, this time with social justice and equity as normative social goals. This will call for a re-working of the austerity programme which the previous government has agreed with the IMF. This is the only way to prevent the recurrence of social discontent and protests by vast sections of the affected people.
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The second is about purifying public life and the culture of governance. Mr. Dissanayake won the presidency on the strength of hopes he had generated for a corruption-free system of government. Eradicating corruption is easier said in an election campaign than actually done after the election because corruption is a highly institutionalised, internationalised and sophisticated vocation. Yet, the issue of corruption will be a crucial test of the new President’s political success as well as his credibility.
What the people seem to expect from the new President is a new beginning that will lead to a ‘genuine change’ (saba wenasak, in Sinhala). At the presidential election, Sri Lanka’s people took the first major step in that direction by effecting an unusually radical change in who governs. It is now up to President Dissanayake and his NPP government to prove that they — representatives of the non-elite social classes — are better rulers and better democrats with greater sensitivity to people’s expectations for ‘genuine change’.
Jayadeva Uyangoda is Emeritus Professor of political science, University of Colombo, Sri Lanka
Published - September 25, 2024 12:16 am IST
