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Big Match: UNP/SJB and SLPP/SLFP
With the Presidential Commission on the Easter Attacks exonerating (though not absolving) Ranil Wickremesinghe and unreservedly indicting Maithripala Sirisena, there’s bound to be a seismic shift in politics in the country. The SLFP’s response to the Commission – a rejection of its findings, basically – and its decision to appoint Mr Sirisena as Party Chairman must be viewed, and placed, firmly in that context.
Ranil Wickremesinghe might not be the best communicator in national politics today, but if his interview with WION about the Commission’s findings is anything to go by, it’s becoming clear he’s attempting a comeback. This is obviously going to have an impact, not just on deteriorating relations between the SLFP and the SLPP, but more importantly on thawing relations between the UNP and the SJB.
What explains the rift between the former two parties and the reconciliation between the latter two parties? Whether in government or in opposition, the SLFP has tended to splinter and divide, and the UNP has tended to unify. If the UNP ever threatened to break apart from within – as it did in the 1980s with the rise of Ranasinghe Premadasa– negotiation usually held it together firmly. No such fate visited the SLFP.
The UNP continues to be dominated by a compradore-neoliberal clique, despite the present government having co-opted Colombo’s corporate bloc in the run-up to the November 2019 election. The SJB is not really a reflection of the UNP – it is more populist than neoliberal – but as Mr Harin Fernando’s overtures to the parent party and the confidence with which he spoke of a rapprochement show, the one cannot do without the other. To borrow a familiar metaphor, the SJB is like a son trying to mend relations with his estranged father.
Mr Ranjith Maddumabandara’s attempt at downplaying the possibility of such a merger indicates that there is still opposition to it within the SJB, from the Premadasa faction. But his attempt at saving face should be seen for what it is: a move to legitimise Mr Premadasa’s position as leader of a future UNP-SJB alliance, rather than a pushback against the UNP and the SJB coming together at all.
How will this marriage work out? Simple. The UNP represents class interests which can only co-opt, not consolidate, whatever populist credentials the SJB has; this is true with or without Ranil Wickremesinghe in the UNP. If Maddumabandara’s remarks about his disappointment at Wickremesinghe remaining in the latter party are anything to go by, it’s clear that any SJB-UNP merger will have as its outcome his replacement by Premadasa. Once this is done, the SJB will simply no longer matter; its post-bearers will turn into its pall-bearers, and whatever relevance it had will probably fade away, even if the party name sticks.
Does that necessarily make for an alignment of the interests of one party with those of the other? The difference between these two outfits, as things stand, is less one of substance than of degree, but that does not automatically mean the one is the other. Mr Premadasa’s blend of populist rhetoric and meritocratic appeal attracts a bigger slice of the electorate than Mr Wickremesinghe can or ever will, though to rationalise this as some sort of historical and fundamental split between populists and neoliberals in the UNP would be putting the cart before the horse; as the experience of the last 40 or so years shows, neoliberal economics is not always opposed to populist politics. The two can cohabit, as they did under successive UNP regimes and even, to an extent, under Chandrika Kumaratunga.
It must thus be pointed out that its exclusion of the UNP’s leadership from its hierarchy does not necessarily free the SJB from the UNP’s ideology. Far from it. Harin Fernando’s attempt to bring the two back together again must be seen as yet another instance of Premadasa’s stalwarts summoning the spectre of the parent party: to his attempt we can add Harsha de Silva’s valorisation of the UNP’s foreign policy under yahapanalanist rule, one which no less a figure than Premadasa’s Senior International Relations Advisor, Dr Dayan Jayatilleka, has deemed an unmitigated and disastrous failure. The SJB’s relative silence on the issue of the estate workers – it has been far less silent on the burial controversy and the sugar scandal – moreover seems to indicate that, as far as their economic outlook is concerned, they are still stuck in a neoliberal worldview, unable to get out. It is for this reason that, if he aspires for a broad democratic front which is not only multiethnic but also multiclass, Premadasa must do all he can do distance the SJB from the UNP.
If the SJB is trying to reconcile with the UNP, the SLFP seems to be trying to distance itself from the SLPP. The gulf between the latter two has proved to be wider than the gulf between the former two. This is not surprising: populist as it may be, the SJB has at its apex the ex-middle-benchers of the UNP, while the SLFP even now tends to define itself in opposition to the SLPP. To employ that familiar metaphor again, the SLFP is acting more and more like a father trying to disown his son.
The SLPP represents a wide social base ranging from a lower-middle class to a Colombo condominium class, from the heartland of the South to the rimland of the capital. Targeting all these groups did help the party win two elections and secure a two-thirds majority, yet it also hindered it from achieving the stability a monolithic party holding together so many class interests should aspire to. It cannot be a purely populist outfit, nor can it turn into a neo-UNP. Dominated by so many groups, it has become a hostage to them all.
Naturally, such political alliances cannot last without at least the semblance of intra-party conflicts breaking out into the open. And they have. The ruckus over the ECT deal showed that well: while the Jacobin nationalists led by Mr Wimal Weerawansa and the Old Left led by Mr Vasudeva Nanayakkara and Mr Tissa Vitarana opposed the lease-out arrangement along with the SLFP, the nationalist right remained ambivalent towards it: with some of them arguing that any deal was better than no deal and others arguing that no harm could come from a private investor, they seemed less concerned with a transaction involving a strategic asset than with, say, the 13th Amendment. The sugar scandal and the release of the Easter Attacks Commission’s findings have helped escalate these conflicts, while the contradictions the regime has got itself mired in vis-à-vis Geneva 2021 – like its ambivalent attitude towards Muslims, oscillating between aggressive remarks and conciliatory gestures – have escalated them even more. This is Catch-22 at its finest and most unenviable.
To me the fundamental problem with the SLPP is that it is trying to be many things at the same time. No broad coalition can survive without unity and without accommodating dissent views. The Viyath Maga and Eliya (VM-E) coterie which helped Mr Gotabaya Rajapaksa to come to power, which occupies a moderately prominent place in the SLPP, must thus realise that insofar as their contribution was and is significant, it was but a continuum from the broad populist-leftist alliance that in 2015 launched a campaign to bring Mahinda Rajapaksa back as Prime Minister. The latter grouping simply cannot, and should not, be ignored.
The SLPP can let go of what little populist-leftist credentials it has to canvass support from a nationalist middle-class only at the cost of losing the charisma that Mahinda Rajapaksa, as well as Gotabaya Rajapaksa, summons outside that nationalist middle-class, which anyway is no longer the powerfully monolithic bloc it once was. To put that in perspective, no matter how high on economic paradigms the VM-E coterie and the SLPP minus the Left may be, if they consider those paradigms a substitute for a broad, popular political front, they will have to pay the price for their trivialisation of the latter at the ballot box.
The questions to be asked here then are, firstly, to what extent divisions in the SLPP will last, and secondly, to what extent the UNP and the SJB will iron out their differences and come back as one. In both cases – SLPP/SLFP and UNP/SJB – it’s a question of when, not whether, the nationalist-populist parent will disown its nationalist-populist son, and when, not whether, the populist son will return to its neoliberal parent.
Insofar as political divisions go, and if history is a good indicator of where things will end, the neoliberal right has a better chance of unification with the populist right than the nationalist-populist centre-right has with the nationalist-populist centre-left. It is not my call to say which of these eventualities bodes well for us; all I can say is what may happen, and where things are headed. The first task of the political commentator is not to paste this label or that on this political grouping or that, but to sift through varying class interests to find out how they can bring such groupings together and break them apart. Everything else comes later.
The writer can be reached at udakdev1@gmail.com