By Vishvanath
The 2025 Local Government (LG) elections have thrown up quite a few surprises. Their outcome has made political parties and their leaders, given to moral grandstanding, lay bare their true faces—selfish, evasive and opportunistic. Before the LG elections, the NPP as well as the SJB vowed not to forge any alliances, electoral or otherwise. But the election results made them do about-turns and woo other parties and independent groups to secure control of the hung councils. The post-election period has been characterized by horse trading.
Politics is full of uncertainties and unpredictable twists and turns. There is hardly anything that politicians and political parties do not do to gain or retain power, which is the be-all and end-all of politics. They never hesitate to subjugate their policies and principles to their political interests. One may recall that Maithripala Sirisena, who won the coveted executive presidency by vilifying the Rajapaksa family as a wellspring of corruption and promising to throw them behind bars for their alleged crimes, in 2015, closed ranks with them three years later. Ranil Wickremesinghe, who was the Prime Minister in the Yahapalana government, which prioritized bashing the Rajapaksas over everything else, secured the executive presidency with their help in 2022.
There have been many such instances where political opposites forged very unlikely alliances to protect mutual interests; in 2004, the JVP, which obtained 39 seats by contesting the SLFP-led UPFA coalition, which emerged victorious, wrote a strongly worded letter to the then President Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga, asking her not to appoint Mahinda Rajapaksa as the Prime Minister; it threatened to pull out of her government immediately if she did not heed its demand. She did not give in to the JVP’s pressure and appointed Rajapaksa Prime Minister. The JVP did not pull out over that appointment; it left that government later in protest against a move to share tsunami relief with the LTTE. Interestingly, the following year, the JVP-led Rajapaksa’s presidential election campaign from the front enabled him to win the presidency!
Whoever would have thought that the NPP would ever close ranks with either the SLPP, the UNP or the SJB or the CWC or Pillayan’s TMVP in contests to elect the heads and deputy heads of the non-majority local councils? NPP leaders, including President Anura Kumara Dissanayake and Prime Minister Dr. Harini Amarasuriya, demonized all Opposition politicians as rogues who had ruined the country and therefore had to be kept in the political wilderness until the end of time. That kind of dichotomy helped the NPP win the presidential, parliamentary and local government elections.
The NPP would not touch the Opposition with a barge pole in the parliament, where it has 159 members. Their MPs lock horns at the drop of a hat, and say nasty things about one another. But the NPP has made a policy U-turn and closed ranks with the Opposition parties in the hung local councils to safeguard its interests. So has the SJB, which has condemned the NPP in the strongest possible words as an incompetent, evil force. Some of the hung councils where the NPP has enlisted the support of the Opposition parties or their individual members to have its candidates elected as chairpersons and/or deputy chairpersons are as follows:
Kotagala PS – NPP and CWC
Medawachchiya PS – NPP and SLPP
Minipe PS – NPP and UNP
Welikanda PS – NPP and SJB
Dodangoda PS – NPP and Sarvajana Balaya (of Dilith Jayaweera)
Galle MC – NPP and SLPP
Nuwara Eliya – NPP and CWC
ITAK MP Batticaloa District MP Shanakiyan Rasamanickam recently claimed in the parliament that the NPP had helped Makkal Viduthalai Pulikal (TMVP) led by former State Minister Sivanesathurai Chandrakanthan, better known as ‘Pillayan,’ to secure control of the Vakarai PS. Pilleyan is currently in remand custody over the 2006 abduction and disappearance of a university vice chancellor in the Eastern Province. The NPP gained a lot of political mileage by bashing Pilleyan. In an X post Rasamanickam accused the NPP of betraying its principles by supporting the TMVP candidate to secure the Chairman’s post, defeating the ITAK. The NPP has chosen to remain silent on this accusation.
In another interesting turn of events, the NPP and the SJB councilors joined forces in the Norwood PS, on Friday (27) to defeat the CWC, which won 06 seats in last month’s LG polls. The NPP, which also has 06 seats in the Norwood PS, was backed by five SJB councilors and an Independent member. In return, the NPP helped an SJB member secure the deputy chairpersonship of the council. Nobody expected this kind of cooperation between the NPP and the SJB group. It is said that expediency also makes strange bedfellows. Claiming that its councilors cooperated with the NPP in the Norwood PS without its blessings, the SJB has warned its councilors that they will face disciplinary action soon. But what they have done cannot be undone; the NPP has consolidated its hold the Norwood PS. A party that secures the post of Chairman in a local council can remain in power for two years even it fails to have it annual budget passed, according to the local government election laws.
What is more interesting is the fact that the NPP would not have been able to bag the Nuwara Eliya Municipal without the support of the CWC, which it subsequently defeated with the help of the SJB councilors in the Norwood PS. Before last month’s LG elections, the NPP lashed out at the CWC, vowing to liberate the estate workers from the latter’s clutches. Plantation workers voted overwhelmingly for the NPP in last year’s parliamentary election. It promoted Ambika Samuel as a liberator, and she was elected to Parliament. She has been bashing the CWC. She will have a hard time explaining to her voters why the NPP opted for an alliance with the CWC in some local councils.
The NPP and the SJB have exemplified the cliched axiom—there are no permanent friends or permanent enemies in politics. They have also demonstrated that despite their much-flaunted commitment to policies and principles they do not hesitate to act out of expediency to further their interests.
