by Vishvanath
Sri Lanka is known for its high voter enthusiasm, which is however not reflected in the unfolding scenario ahead of the Nov. 14 general election. Victory in one election usually gives a big fillip to the winner’s efforts to win another soon afterwards and make others double down on their campaigns to shore up their vote bases and control damage.
More than 8,800 candidates are contesting this year’s general election, but fewer than 1,000 of them are actively campaigning, Rohana Hettiarachchi, Executive Director of the People’s Action for Free and Fair Elections has been quoted by the media as saying. Although hundreds of political parties and independent groups are in the fray and allowed to establish around 600,000 campaign offices, only about 9,200 offices have been set up, he has said.
Perhaps, the current situation is due to the fact that the JVP-led NPP was unable to score an outright victory in the September presidential contest, which saw a preferential vote count for the first time in this country, with the winner, NPP candidate Anura Kumara Dissanayake, obtaining only 42% of the valid votes. The NPP kept telling the public that its candidate would poll more than 7.5 million votes, but he received only 5,634,915 votes.
The NPP has sought to explain the discernible decrease in voter enthusiasm in the light of the demoralization of the Opposition, which, it says, has given up the fight, and the retirement of about 60 senior politicians in its rival camp. The validity of this argument is not without some merit, but the fact remains that even the NPP supporters are not as enthusiastic as they were before the presidential election. This may be due to the non-fulfilment of some of the NPP’s key campaign promises, which the people thought would be carried out immediately after the change of government in September, some of them being a radical departure from the previous administration approach to the IMF programme, substantial fuel price reductions, and the initiation of probes and legal action against those whom the NPP branded as criminals responsible for the theft of public funds to the tune of billions of rupees.
It may not be fair to expect an interim government to carry out all its election promises within the first few weeks of its formation, but the NPP gave the people to understand before the presidential election that it was capable of doing so. Those who voted for the NPP expected the interim government to get tough with the rice millers and traders given to exploitative practices and market manipulations. But there has been no difference between its approach to the problem and that of the previous governments, which the NPP leaders condemned for collaborating with unscrupulous millers and wholesalers. There have been signs of growing public dissatisfaction, if not disillusionment. This may also be a reason for the low voter enthusiasm.
The NPP leaders would have the public believe that they will obtain a comfortable majority in the next parliament. They keep asking the people to help them cleanse the legislature by giving them an overwhelming majority. If the people had heeded its call, the NPP would have been able to win the Elpitiya PS election on Oct. 26 with a huge majority but there was a discernible dip in the enthusiasm of those who had voted for it in the presidential election; it could secure only 15 out of 30 seats in the council. It won 15 out of the 17 wards in the PS under the new electoral system, which is a combination of the first-past-the-post and proportional representational (PR) systems. It failed to obtain any seats from the PR list, and if the election had been held under the previous system, it would have been able to win only 13 seats, and the total number of council members would have been 28 instead of 30. The total number of council seats went up to 30 because the NPP received two overhang seats. In the 2019 Elpitiya PS election one overhang seat went to the SLPP, which won all 17 wards, and the total number of seats increased to 29 in the previous council. Next week’s parliamentary election will be held under the PR system.
The NPP leaders keep expressing confidence that they will gain control of the next parliament, but their oft-repeated claim that the political parties based in the North and the East will join forces with them in keeping with the wishes of the people in those parts of the country has been construed, in some quarters, as an indication that the NPP is not confident of obtaining a working majority and is therefore planning to enlist the support of the parties such as the ITAK in the next parliament. The EPDP led by Douglas Devananda has already expressed its willingness to work with the NPP after the upcoming general election.
JVP General Secretary Tilvin Silva, in an interview with ITN, on Tuesday night, denied that the NPP was planning to close ranks with the ITAK. Why he has done so is understandable. The nationalistic forces that backed Gotabaya Rajapaksa and the SLPP have thrown their weight behind the NPP. They will not take kindly to an alliance between the NPP and the ITAK, which is demanding land and police powers for the Provincial Councils and a probe into alleged war crimes. However, the Opposition insists that the NPP is intent on securing the support of the Tamil political parties.
The NPP has condemned its political rivals as undesirables who do not deserve to represent the public, and therefore must not be allowed to enter the next parliament. President Dissanayake has called upon the people to elect only NPP candidates to parliament; he has said there is no need for an Opposition. Prime Minister Harini Amarasuriya and other NPP leaders keep stressing that the parliament has to be cleansed as a national priority. So, the NPP will not be able to seek the support of any of its rivals to form a government in case of a hung parliament. It will have to face two more elections next year—Provincial Council and Local Government polls, and forging an alliance with the ‘corrupt’ parties or any of their members is the last thing the NPP wants. It has also embarked on a campaign against crossovers.
Unless the NPP gains control of the parliament outright, President Dissanayake will have his hands tied. A minority government will be short-lived. The fate that befell the Kumaratunga government (2002-2001), following the defection of some of its MPs to the then UNP-led Opposition, is a case in point. President Mahinda Rajapaksa prevented the fall of the UPFA government, with the help of crossovers from the UNP, after the withdrawal of the JVP members in its parliamentary group from it.
It will be interesting to see how the NPP seeks to secure control of the parliament in case of beating others in next week’s election but failing to obtain an absolute majority. In such a situation, the Tamil parties may be able to ensure the survival of the NPP government without joining it, the way the TNA backed the Yahapalana government, especially after the SLFP’s breakaway in 2018, but no such help comes without strings attached in politics, and the NPP will have a hard time justifying its dependence of the ITAK, etc., to the nationalistic section of its support base. There’s the rub.
