by Vishvanath
Sri Lanka is never short of issues, which range from frivolous to the serious, touching on everything from celebrity gossip to national security or debt restructuring, and they crowd out one another, especially on the political front. The dynamics of competing political priorities of the public and the media being such, it is not surprising that an important political development has gone underreported. Only one web news portal, Mawrata News, highlighted it.
The SJB beat the NPP in a cooperative election a few days ago. It bagged the Moratuwa Cooperative Society by polling 51 votes as opposed to the NPP’s 49. The margin of victory is narrow, but the win is decisive in that it has come close on the heels of the NPP’s stunning performance in a general election, which saw a Maroon wave sweeping across the country. More importantly, the NPP has failed to clinch victory in a cooperative society located in a polling division (Moratuwa), which it won in a general election a few weeks ago by polling more than 56,500 votes; the SJB came a poor second with only 14,300 votes.
It will be far-fetched for anyone to claim that the Moratuwa cooperative society election result points to a considerable decline in the NPP’s popularity during the past few weeks or is indicative of a discernible anti-government trend at the grassroots level. But it is something that the NPP, which keeps saying that the Opposition will not be able to make a comeback in the foreseeable future, cannot afford to ignore.
Cooperative elections are usually taken for granted, and their outcomes are determined by various factors most of which do not come into play at the provincial and national level elections, but they can be thought to serve as political windsocks to some extent at the grassroots stratum of the polity. One may recall that the NPP won a considerable number of cooperative elections across the country, indicating its revival at the grassroots level, ahead of this year’s presidential election.
Things do not seem to be going right for the newly-elected NPP government. It was expected to get off to a flying start after its mammoth electoral victory last month, but there was no such liftoff. It is already going through a bad patch, which it surely did not bargain for. The country is experiencing shortages of rice and coconuts, and the prices of the two widely consumed commodities have gone through the roof, much to the resentment of the public. The government has had to import not only rice but also table salt owing to a spell of inclement weather, which took a heavy toll on the local salt production. The JVP-led NPP used to condemn the previous governments for importing rice and call for action to make rice freely available at affordable prices. Now, the boot is on the other foot.
As if the shortages of rice and coconuts were not enough, the government now has a scandal to contend with in a bid to save its image. The ruling party MPs educational and professional qualifications have come under scrutiny, and Speaker Asoka Ranwala, who flaunted a doctorate, has had to resign, unable to prove his claim. Several ministers are under pressure to prove their academic credentials. This situation has come about because the NPP highlighted the educational and professional backgrounds of its candidates ahead of last month’s general election in support of its campaign to ‘cleanse the parliament and fill it with educated members’.
Anti-incumbency sentiments are quite strong in Sri Lanka, so much so that governments used to change alternately every five years in the past. Alternate power shifts in general elections occurred for several decades from Independence until the 1980s, when the pattern faced a disruption; the UNP did away with a parliamentary election due in 1982 with the help of a heavily-rigged referendum and went on to retain control of the parliament in 1988 again by resorting to widespread violence and vote rigging amidst the JVP’s second uprising. The introduction of the Proportional Representation system also brought about a situation where the two-party system gave way to coalition politics.
There have been no consistent alternations of power since the 1980s, and the two-party system has long ceased to exist. The SLFP and the UNP have been reduced to mere nameboards at present, and they are not making a serious effort to regain lost ground. Their debilitation and the resultant failure led to the emergence of the SLPP and the SJB as offshoots respectively, and the SLPP was in power from 2019 to 2024; it too has become a shadow of its former self.
Only the SJB has retained its vitality to a considerable extent despite facing serious electoral setbacks this year. The JVP-led NPP is dominating national politics, having won the executive presidency and gained control of the parliament in quick succession with an unprecedented majority; it won 159 seats in the 225-member parliament in last month’s general election. President Anura Kumara Dissanayake boasted in the parliament on Thursday that the NPP would be in power in 2028, when Sri Lanka’s debt repayment is scheduled to resume.
Political coalitions in this country are always loose alliances characterized by ideological differences, competing ambitions and internal disputes that cause rifts. They tend to disintegrate with the passage of time causing their supporters to look for alternatives and shift their allegiances. This may explain why the SLPP has lost most of its support base to the JVP-led NPP. Nobody may have expected the SLPP supporters to gravitate towards the NPP in droves, but unforeseen circumstances made that happen sooner than expected.
So, there is no guarantee that the NPP’s vote bank will remain intact forever; it, too, is bound to face disintegration. However, it is highly unlikely that the NPP will lose its voters back to the SLPP; they are likely to look for some other alternative. This is what happens when the number of floating voters increase with the traditional support bases of political parties shrinking. Swing voters are always a decisive factor in any election. The number of nonvoters has increased exponentially in this country; it rose to a staggering 5.3 million in last month’s general election. They are also a force that no political party can afford to ignore.
It takes more than huge parliamentary majorities to make stable governments. The SLFP-led United Front won a two-thirds majority in the 1970 parliamentary polls, but faced a crushing defeat at the next general election it faced in 1977. The Mahinda Rajapaksa government mustered a two-thirds majority in 2010, but collapsed in 2015. The SLPP government, under President Gotabaya Rajapaksa, also had a two-thirds majority but suffered crippling splits and eventually faced a humiliating defeat in both presidential and parliamentary elections this year. So, it will be a big mistake for the NPP government to rest on its oars, and take developments such as the SJB’s win in the Moratuwa co-operative society election lightly.
