By Kassapa
The presidential election may be over, Anura Kumara Dissanayake may be President but the political arena in Sri Lanka is still red hot, brimming with heat of the general election Dissanayake has called for November 14, six weeks away. At stake is the political future of many a party and many a leader.
There are frantic moves to reunite the United National Party (UNP) and the Samagi Jana Balavegaya (SJB). Thrown in as an incentive for the SJB is the withdrawal of Ranil Wickremesinghe from the election either as a candidate or as a nominee from the National List. Even so, Sajith Premadasa is refusing to budge and is reportedly asking for his pound of flesh: Wickremesinghe quitting as UNP leader, a demand that will never be met.
The presidential election proved that, had the UNP and the SJB combined and contested as one party, their returns would have been better although that doesn’t necessarily mean that they would have defeated Dissanayake; politics does not operate on simple mathematical formulae alone.
The fact is that the fissures between the UNP run deeper than the ego, personality and leadership clash between Wickremesinghe and Premadasa, though these factors also play a significant part in it. Premadasa left the UNP and formed the SJB because of his fervent belief that, though he was the nominal deputy leader of the party, he would never be given his due place there because Wickremesinghe had his own inner circle: Ravi Karunanayake, Sagala Ratnayake, Akila Viraj Kariyawasam and Vajira Abeywardena to name a few.
Most of those who left with Premadasa to form the SJB left not because they believed in Premadasa’s ability to lead them to the political promised land but because they knew that, had they remained in the UNP in mid-2020, they will be doomed. After four years in the opposition, they have discovered that Premadasa’s chance of ever winning a presidential poll is now remote and that his style of leadership is even more coloured by personal prejudices than Wickremesinghe’s is.
Politics, of course, makes for strange bedfellows. The logical step for both the UNP and the SJB to do is to sink their differences and unite in the face of annihilation but neither Wickremesinghe nor Premadasa is willing to swallow their pride to do so. Meanwhile, time is running out because, although the general elections are six weeks away, nominations close in less than a fortnight and agreement between the two camps within this very short timeframe is looking extremely unlikely.
Spare a thought too for Wickremesinghe’s former ministers in his Cabinet, the vast majority of them from the Sri Lanka Podujana Peramuna (SLPP). They now have to pay the price for backing the wrong horse in Wickremesinghe and ignoring their own party’s candidate, Namal Rajapaksa.
This lot is in political No Man’s Land now. Out of office and out of power and not contesting the election, Wickremesinghe is no longer the giant shadow he was a few weeks ago. His UNP will not want to be tainted with scandals associated with the Ranatungas, Abeygunawardenas, Aluthgamages and Allesses, to name just a few because they know that will cost them precious votes. Besides, even the slimmest prospect of a deal with the SJB will be scuppered if the SLPP rebels remain with the UNP.
These SLPP discards will now have to take refuge in the political alliance they fashioned in the dying days of the presidential election campaign, the so-called ‘Podujana Eksath Nidahas Pakshaya’ (PENP) which has the ‘trophy’ as their symbol. The chances of this newly formed PENP running against the UNP and the SJB, not to mention President Dissanayake’s Jathika Jana Balavegaya (JJB) and securing even a few seats in the next Parliament are miniscule.
The same can be said of the Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP). Smashed into smithereens even before the presidential election and with factions battling each other in many courts, the most dominant group of the party led by Nimal Siripala de Silva is trying desperately to hang on to its alliance with the UNP. Dayasiri Jayasekara remains with the SJB for now and Maithripala Sirisena is blissfully non-committal. Given this state of affairs, the party that has governed Sri Lanka for the most number of years will be lucky to have even a single representative in the next Parliament.
Also in the same predicament is the SLPP although it is not cursed by so many warring factions. What is worrying is the 2.5 per cent it recorded at the presidential election. What was once the party’s greatest asset, the ‘Rajapaksa’ name, is now its greatest liability. What happened to the SLPP on September 21 is akin to what happened to the UNP in August 2020 and it could well be reduced to just one National List seat, if that.
What the presidential election has done then is not only to install a truly ‘common’ man in the President’s Office but to also shatter the established political order, the much maligned ‘two party’ system into a dozen disparate groups, ensuring that none of them have a clear advantage over their rivals.
Perhaps it could be argued that it is the SJB which will still command a lion’s share of the opposition vote at the general election. That may indeed be so but they will still be well short of what is required to form a competitive opposition.
What the ‘aragalaya’ has done, two years later, is to upend the Lankan political landscape. Previously, right-of-centre parties held sway and even the SLFP and SLPP, though proclaiming to be more left-leaning, only veered slightly to the left. The traditional left had died long ago and the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP) which aspired to replace them was only recording single digit percentages at election time. Now, the unashamedly leftist NPP has assumed power and the right-of centre parties are gasping for breath and struggling to survive.
This then is Sri Lanka’s new political order. Whatever the results of the November 14 election, there is one certainty: it will be curtains for many long-term career politicians who will become the unfortunate orphans of political defeat.
