Maithripala Sirisena, it appears, has the opposite of the Midas touch: whatever he touches, turns to dust, the latest victim being the United Peoples’ Freedom Alliance (UPFA).
The sixth Executive President of Sri Lanka made a mockery of the Presidency which he won largely due to the votes of the United National Party (UNP). To run for President, he betrayed the Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP) where he still holds the record of being its longest serving General Secretary.
Having served as General Secretary under Chandrika Kumaratunga and Mahinda Rajapaksa, he betrayed Rajapaksa to run for President against his leader and, contrary to expectations and thanks to a surge of hatred towards the Rajapaksas, won.
Elected on a platform of abolishing the Executive Presidency and punishing the Rajapaksas for their excesses, Sirisena kept neither of those promises. It is true that he wasn’t helped by the high and mighty attitude of his Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe who behaved as if he, and not Sirisena, was the head of the government and didn’t give Sirisena the respect his office deserved.
Nevertheless, Sirisena reneged on his pledges in abominable fashion, sacking Wickremesinghe and appointing Rajapaksa, the man he spoke so passionately against, as his Prime Minister. He then went on to dissolve Parliament, a move that earned him an ignominy that no Sri Lankan President- not even Gotabaya Rajapaksa- has had to bear: he was sanctioned by the Supreme Court which deemed his actions ‘unconstitutional’.
The Easter terror attacks under Sirisena’s watch were the final nail in the coffin of his Presidency. Such was his penchant for bungling that, in a strange irony, the Presidential Commission he himself appointed recommended the institution of criminal proceedings against him for negligence of his responsibilities!
Now out of power and out of place but still lingering in Parliament, he is the nominal head of what remains of the SLFP and the UPFA.
Sirisena’s fundamental mistake after becoming President was to try and gain control of the SLFP and the UPFA. In doing so, he forgot that he was President only because of the votes he received from the UNP and other smaller parties. The electoral map clearly showed that, even though he lost the election, Mahinda Rajapaksa still won in regions which were SLFP and UPFA strongholds.
By trying to gain control of the SLFP and the UPFA, Sirisena was trying to please a segment of the electorate that didn’t vote for him. In fact, he was trying to cater to an audience that rejected him and preferred the ‘known devil’ in Rajapaksa.
By virtue of a quirk in the constitution of the SLFP- which decreed that if a member of the party was the leader of the country, they automatically became the leader of the party- Sirisena inherited the leadership of the SLFP. However, he failed to realise that, as far as the vote base of the two parties was concerned, they were still very much with Mahinda Rajapaksa.
That is why, when the Rajapaksas formed the Sri Lanka Podujana Peramuna (SLPP), they defected en masse to join the new party. That is also why Sirisena’s SLFP faced an embarrassing defeat at the 2018 local government elections which the SLPP won easily. That foretold the outcome of the presidential and general elections in 2019 and 2020.
Today, Sirisena heads a SLFP which has fourteen MPs in Parliament but eight of them have pledged allegiance to the government headed by Ranil Wickremesinghe. So, in effect his party is reduced to six MPs. That is the plight that Sirisena has subjected the party founded by S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike.
Sirisena is still active on his trail of destruction. Last week, he sacked UPFA General Secretary Mahinda Amaraweera and replaced him with another Sirisena loyalist with equally dubious credentials, Thilanga Sumathipala.
Sirisena’s political shenanigans could be dismissed as the last-ditch attempts by a political maverick to try and make his presence felt, if not for the fact that he is inadvertently strengthening the government by weakening the opposition, creating divisions within the SLFP.
Just as much as the bulk of MPs of the Samagi Jana Balavegaya (SJB) hail from their parent party, the UNP, most SLPP MPs have their roots in the SLFP. That is where the similarity ends, though.
The SJB and its leader Sajith Premadasa have succeeded- with the exceptions of Harin Fernando, Manusha Nanayakkara and Diana Gamage- in keeping their flock together. In contrast, SLPP MPs opposed to the hegemony of the Rajapaksas find themselves in several disparate groups led by different individuals: Dullas Alahapperuma, Wimal Weerawansa, Anura Priyadarshana Yapa and Maithripala Sirisena. It is an indictment on Sirisena that he, a former President, leads the group with the least number of MPs.
Chandrika Kumaratunga, still the only leader whom the public identify with the SLFP, is probably more livid with Sirisena than she is with the Rajapaksas. It was Kumaratunga and the late Mangala Samaraweera who were instrumental in the behind-the-scenes manoeuvres that propelled Sirisena to the presidential candidacy in 2015. Not only did he betray first Rajapaksa and then Wickremesinghe, Sirisena has now betrayed Kumaratunga too, sacking her as the SLFP’s patron.
Kumaratunga, it has been reported, has now given her blessings to a new party led by Kumara Welgama although the chances of that outfit becoming a viable contender for government at the next election is as good as Sirisena being elected President again.
Thus, the damage done by Sirisena to Sri Lanka’s political landscape is considerable. He has succeeded in splitting and dividing the left-of-centre political forces into several impotent splinter groups. If they remain divided at the time of the next election, they will only help one party and their patrons, the SLPP and the Rajapaksas. If the SLPP is further boosted by Wickremesinghe’s UNP- and that is not fanciful thinking- Sri Lankans will need a miracle to save them from disaster.
It is hard to imagine that one man can do so much damage to so many political parties in so short a time. Unfortunately, Maithripala Sirisena has.
