Political Storms, Imagined and Real

Photo courtesy of Daily Mirror

“I like the politicians who tell the truth – so that’s none of them.” A British voter (The Guardian 19.6.2024)

Two years ago, on July 20, 2022, the Sri Lankan parliament voted to elect a successor president to Gotabaya Rajapaksa. The SLPP put its full weight behind Ranil Wickremesinghe; even a parliamentarian hospitalised for surgery was brought to vote in an ambulance. Mr Wickremesinghe won with 134 votes.

Sixteen votes short of a two-thirds majority.

There is no reason to think Mr. Wickremesinghe can do any better if the ill-timed 22nd Amendment comes for a vote. He won’t. The numbers simply don’t ally. Mr. Wickremesinghe cannot clear the two-thirds bar, however hard he tries. Not even with all the powers of the presidency. Not even if the SLPP backs him wholeheartedly.

Mr. Wickremesinghe’s purpose in bringing the 22nd amendment is unclear, for it cannot be used to postpone, let alone cancel, the presidential election. All he has succeeded in doing is creating a storm in a teacup with a great deal of assistance from a segment of the opposition predisposed to see a storm in every teacup of Ranil Wickremesinghe’s making.

President Wickremesinghe might want the presidential election postponed by a year, by two or a hundred. But it is an unachievable goal, outside of a genie in a lamp sort of situation.

The 1982 Referendum analogy does not work in real life. True, J.R. Jayewardene did postpone the parliamentary election but he managed it under totally different circumstances. He had the numbers in parliament (a four-fifth majority no less and they were his parliamentarians, not parliamentarians on loan to him) and political power outside, on the ground. He had just won a presidential election, bettering the UNP’s record breaking 1977 performance. (The UNP won the parliamentary election of 1977 with 51% and 3.2 million votes. J.R. Jayewardene won the 1982 presidential election with 53% and 3.4 million votes.). He was the leader of the most popular and the best organised party in the country. He held all the aces. The referendum would become a byword in unfreedom and unfairness but the UNP could have clawed to victory even without massive violations of election laws. It was not so much necessity as hubris which made the UNP turn the referendum into a violent charade.

Ranil Wickremesinghe possesses none of J.R. Jayewardene’s advantages. He has neither the legitimacy nor the political muscle. He has not won a national election since 2015. The UNP is a barely visible shadow of the politico-electoral juggernaut it was in 1982. And even if the SLPP backs him fully, the 22nd amendment cannot clear the two-thirds hurdle. The only way it can is if enough opposition parliamentarians defect to Mr Wickremesinghe. One or two might; 16 or more won’t.

There is also the timing. Even if the bill is presented to the parliament late next week (according to media reports, the earliest this can happen is July 26) three to five weeks will have to go before it can return to parliament for a vote (a mandatory two weeks for the public to seek legal remedies against it and a maximum of three weeks for the judiciary to make its decision). By that time, the presidential election campaign will be in full swing.

Some opposition members argue that the Supreme Court will give the 22nd amendment a free pass by removing the two-third majority and referendum hurdles and determining that the amendment requires only a simple majority. The government will get the amendment through, fast, and immediately bring a proposal to extend the life of this president and this parliament, they warn.

This fearmongering is based on a gigantic lie – judicial complicity. There is no reason to believe that the judiciary will dance to President Wickremesinghe’s tune now. It hasn’t in the last two years and it will not in the remaining couple of months (thus the president’s periodic outbursts against the judiciary). Plus, any proposal extending the life of president/parliament will need a two-thirds majority – votes neither Mr. Wickremesinghe nor the SLPP has – and will not have.

The JVP/NPP is correct in treating the proposed 22nd amendment as a bagatelle. The presidential election cannot be postponed constitutionally. President Wickremesinghe lacks the political wherewithal to postpone the election unconstitutionally. The presidential election will happen on time, on a Saturday between September 21 and October 12.  And a new president – whose name is not Ranil or Wickremesinghe – will be sworn in before October 19.

The aftermath of that choice is quite another matter.

A three way fight and a disenchanted electorate

President Wickremesinghe’s electoral rating has improved according to the Institute for Health Policy’s (IHP) latest poll. He is currently at 15%, with a generic SLPP candidate winning 7%. If the Rajapaksas decide to back Mr. Wickremesinghe fully, he has a chance of winning around 25% of the vote at the upcoming presidential election.

This upward movement tallies with another finding, the latest Mood of the Nation poll by Verite Research. According to June results, the government’s approval rating has increased to 21%. (The government’s approval rating was 10% in the Verite Research’s February Mood of the Nation poll, while the IHP poll for that month gave a Wickremesinghe-SLPP combo a rating of 13%, indicating that there could be a correspondence between the two sets of findings).

If the trend continues, the election will become a three way battle. But there’s no conceivable scenario in which Mr. Wickremesinghe can be one of the two frontrunners – outside of a UNP-SJB reunification – another impossibility.

The two frontrunners at the coming election would be Sajith Premadasa and Anura Kumara Dissanayake. According to the IHP May poll, they are at 38% and 39% respectively. Mr. Dissanayake’s ratings have come down (he was at 51% once) and Mr. Premadasa’s ratings have gone up. If there is no major change in voter sentiments between now and election day, a winner will not emerge in the first round. A second round of vote counting might give Sajith Premadasa an edge, assuming enough UNPers decide to cast their second preference for him.

Someone will win the election but none of the major candidates enjoy a net favourability rating as per IHP calculations. All have negative favourability scores; more voters either disapprove of them or are indifferent to them than approve of them. According to June IHP findings, Anura Kumara Dissanayake leads the pack with a net approval rating of minus 20 (-20). Sajith Premadasa is second at minus 39 (-39) while Ranil Wickremesinghe lags behind at minus 66 (-66). The election will thus determine not the most popular candidate but the least unpopular of them all.

At the recent elections, British and French voters were “…driven more by anger and resentment than actually forsomething,” a professor of French and European politics in the University College London pointed out. South Africa was no different. Even Narendra Modi, with his high net favourability rating, failed to clear the 50% mark. In the US too, the winner would be the least unpopular candidate as both Joe Biden and Donald Trump have net unfavourability ratings.

Disenchanted electorates, yearning for change, yet not knowing what that change should be or how to achieve it. As a French voter put it, “No one’s happy. We are going round in circles. It feels like we’ve tried everything and now we’re lost. But people are right not to be happy. They vote, then nothing changes. So now we’re going to get the extremes. Whereas you’recoming to your senses”. Unfortunately, a swing to the extreme is not likely to result in reformation or betterment but general ruin. Utopia and dystopia are often the two sides of the same unrealistic coin.

The day after

The last violent Lankan election was the presidential poll of 2015. Every single election after that has been mostly free, fair, and non-violent.

Hopefully, the presidential election will continue the trend. Hopefully no human will be killed or injured and no property destroyed in making this election.

The election will be held on September 28, latest media reports claim. It has to be held before on October 12, as per the constitution.

Then will come the day after. There’s always a day after.

Sri Lanka is not out of the abyss the Rajapaksas led her into, mistake by mistake, starting with the devastating tax cut of December 2019. But we have exited the bottom, managed to claw our way a little way up. Two years later, it is easy to deliberately downplay the devastating impact of queues, power cuts and shortages on life and living. But those were deadly times, unprecedented times and the path wrought by Ranil Wickremesinghe helped end them. The victor of upcoming presidential election must build on this limited but real achievement, and not jeopardise it with fanciful policies and impractical actions, a la Gotabaya Rajapaksa.

As a veritable stream of former Rajapaksa acolytes streak to the SJB, the party is in danger of losing its identity and becoming a Rajapaksa-lite entity. This, and Sajith Premadasa’s deferential dependence on Buddhist clergy, might make some of his key promises non-starters. For example, if he actually tries to implement the 13th Amendment in full, how will his Sangha Advisory Council or the former Rajapaksa acolytes turned SJB stalwarts react?

Populists, says political philosopher Jan-Werner Müller, believe they are the sole representative of “the real people”, the silent majority. In a Lankan context, “the real people” is a euphemism for Sinhalese and especially Sinhala-Buddhists. The two frontrunners of the upcoming election are in thrall to this variety of national-populism and unusually dependent on Buddhist clergy and retired military personnel for support and even legitimacy. The chances of either party moving beyond the Sinhala-Buddhist comfort zone – whatever promises they make during election time – is highly unlikely. Hopefully, they will stop at cowardice and not actively promote ethno-religious racism, as a way of holding power or gaining power.

Populism can present a threat not just to the minorities but also to sections of the majority community. Take two recent statements by maverick JVP leader Lal Kantha (whose intelligence and imagination needs to be acknowledged). In a recent speech, he argued that after electoral victory, Malimawa (NPP) will be the people, the people will be Malimawa and there won’t be a gap between the two.

One country, one people is not a democratic formula but an autocratic one. Democracy accepts the differences among people, that there’s no People but many people with differing opinions, expectations, and choices. Any equation of Malimawa and people by a victorious NPP/JVP will mean that the people who refuse to be with Malimawa will be downgraded to the status of non-people.

A gleaning of how this equation might work in practice was provided by Mr. Lal Kantha at another rally. “When organising this meeting, we faced just one obstacle. His name is Wasthiwattage. He is an official of the (Kandy) municipal council… The progressive people of this country should know about people like him. The names of those in the public service who kowtow to politicians would be made available to people… A group from the municipal council removed (our) cutout… This Wasthiwattage has told them to remove it… What do we do to people like these when the era of renaissance comes? They have to be rehabilitated”. According to the internet, the official was merely carrying out the order of the Kandy Municipal Council, removing all illegal cutouts.

Gotabhaya Rajapaksa had a knack for conjuring enemies. His stable of suitable enemies ranged from Tamil extremists to irresponsible extremists (People/organisations who fail to “exercise their democratic freedoms with responsibility”), Islamic extremists to anti-democratic extremists (people who “go beyond peaceful demonstrations and engage in violent protest, incite violence or act in other undemocratic ways”). It included a chief justice who refused to toe the Rajapaksa line on all occasions and a former army commander who charted his own political path.

There is not much of a difference between what the Rajapaksas did and what Lal Kantha intends to do, what Lohan Ratwatte said recently about not permitting a NPP/JVP victory and what Lal Kantha said about rehabilitating public officials. Intolerance is intolerance irrespective where it comes from and what words it is cloaked in. And in an intolerant land, anyone could become a victim, even those who consider themselves “real people”.