Countdown Week in Sri Lanka and Debate Week in the US

by Rajan Philips

As Sri Lanka starts the countdown week before its September 21 presidential vote, the US finished the debate week that is expected to set the campaign tones for the remaining eight weeks before its presidential election on November 5. In a riveting performance last Tuesday, the Democratic candidate Kamala Harris exceeded all expectations and with consummate lawyerly skill laid bare the utter limitations and disqualifications of Donald Trump to be America’s president a second time.

The incoherent and blustering Trump undoubtedly made Harris’s debate tasks a whole lot easier, but the pre-debate onus was on her to show that she could perform in an unscripted engagement just as well as she is showing herself to be in organized rallies and in delivering tele-prompted speeches. And she did that superbly.

As debate politics goes, the big US and little Sri Lanka are at extreme ends. Sri Lankan presidential candidates have studiously avoided the ordeal of a face to face debate in a structured forum and the challenge of responding to independently prepared questions. Instead, they are firing questions and making accusations about one another but only from the security of their own platforms and in front of their own cheerers and hangers on. President Ranil Wickremesinghe would seem to have taken this old approach to a new level in what is fast becoming his last hurrah.

A Lopsided US Method

In the US, on the other hand, self-serving media hype has turned presidential debates into the single most pivotal moment to establish the eligibility of one candidate over the other. The irony of it is that a single debate between two American candidates gets all the hype and attention in what is globally the most consequential political election. Even so, while doing well in the debate was hugely necessary for Kamala Harris to validate her credentials, it is not at all sufficient to ensure her victory in November.

Like her Democratic predecessors, Al Gore, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden, Harris is certain to win the popular vote; that is the majority of the total votes in the election. But that will not be enough unless she also gets the majority 270 of the 538 Electoral College (EC) votes in the undemocratically calibrated US presidential election system.

Al Gore polled more than George Bush nationally in the 2000 millennial election, but lost the EC vote and the election to Bush, because of his narrow loss in a single state, Florida and its 30 EC votes. Hillary Clinton similarly won the national vote but lost to Donald Trump in 2016 because of her loss in three Midwestern states – Michigan (15 EC votes), Wisconsin (10) and Pennsylvania (19), all of which had been won by Obama in the two previous elections. Biden turned the tables on Trump in 2020 and won all three states and took two more (Arizona and Georgia) from Trump.

Kamala Harris is running strong but tight with Trump in all the above five states that Biden won, and has brought two more into play – North Carolina and Nevada that Trump won in 2020. She has tremendously improved the chances of a Democratic victory since taking over from Biden, but nothing is certain until the votes in the now seven swing states are cast and counted.

The rest of the fifty states are divided between the two parties with baked in support no matter who the candidates are. Identification with and loyalty to either of the two parties is well entrenched in American politics. Democrats are dominant in 18 states, the so called blue states that are more urban, populous and diverse, and account for 225 EC votes. Republicans hold sway in the 25 red states that are relatively less populous, more rural and more white, and carry 219 EC votes.

The challenge for Harris is to win enough of the seven states to get 45 more (270-225) EC votes and prevent Trump from getting the 51(270-219) EC votes he needs from any number of the seven states. The margins of victory in any and all of these states could be a few thousand votes. And those voters will determine who America’s president and the world’s superpower leader will be for the next four years. A rather lopsided method for choosing the world’s most consequential political individual. All the more so, when it could lead to the second election of someone like Donald Trump, whom Kamala Harris clinically dismissed as a national disgrace and a global joke.

The Sri Lankan Variant

The Sri Lankan voters do not have the weight of the world on their hands, but they carry the fate of the country’s economy and its politics at least for the next five years. While Sri Lanka does not have an electoral college screening system as in the US, it has its own undemocratic aspect by virtue of the ranked method to determine the winner if no candidate passes the 50% muster on the first count. As everyone is predicting, the winner next week is likely to be determined after counting the second and the third preferential votes for the first two candidates marked on the ballots of all the other candidates.

The two front runners are widely expected to be Anura Kumara Dissanayake and Sajith Premadasa, with Ranil Wickremesinghe running third – but how close or far behind is still anyone’s guess. While neither of the two front runners is expected to get more than 50% of the vote, it is also likely that whoever comes first will end up the winner even after counting the preferential votes.

The not so strange rivals

The chances are that the ultimate winner may not even exceed 40% of the vote. He could even win with only a third of the vote and would immediately be stigmatized as the executive president with one-third mandate. In a polity that swears by the two-thirds majority. No matter, the country will have a new president. Unless Ranil Wickremesinghe magically manages in one week to bewitch an electorate that has grown tired of him over several decades. Yet it would have been more democratic, but expensive, to have a second runoff election between the two front runners to elect a president with a clear majority.

There is a second point of difference between the US and Sri Lankan presidential elections. In the US, the president, the whole House of Representatives and a third of the Senate are all elected on the same day. The new administration and the legislature start their new tenure after the inauguration in January following the November election. The Sri Lankan presidential election next week will complete only half the job. The new president will assume office almost immediately after the election, but will be stuck with the old parliament that is crying to be put out of its misery. Again, there are unprecedented possibilities.

Anura Kumara Dissanayake has declared that if elected he would immediately dissolve parliament and call for a general election. There will be a caretaker government until a new parliament is elected. That is a clean as a whistle approach that is consistent with AKD’s promise to start a new chapter for the country. But it is not without perils and pitfalls. The size of his vote will determine the leeway he has in implementing a caretaker government. And the performance of the caretaker government with AKD as president will hugely determine the NPP’s fortunes at the parliamentary election.

The challenges are huge given the NPP’s inexperience in government. Innocence in government ceases to be a virtue once you start making choices and decisions that impact people. There may not be much time for expatriate experts to arrive and take care of a caretaker government before the parliamentary election. Unless there is already a plan in AKD’s back pocket.

Sajith Premadasa, unless I have missed it, has not taken a clear position like AKD on what he will do with the current parliament if he (SP) were elected as president. Unlike AKD, SP has enough numbers in parliament to form an interim cabinet and keep going for a while before calling a general election. He will have the opposite problem to that of AKD. While AKD will have to bring in people whom nobody knows, Sajith Premadasa will have a time excluding people whom everyone hates. It is difficult to see what Ranil Wickremesinghe will do differently if he were to beat all odds and be elected as president. He could certainly savour his lifetime achievement but that will be of no service to the country.

Both Dissanayake and Premadasa will have to figure out a way to implement their promise to eliminate the elected-executive presidential system. The easiest and the surest way would be to start the process immediately and tag a referendum question on the presidency to the general election ballot. That would call for a decision on their own status as president – if they are ready to do the opposite of, and reverse, what JRJ did in 1977/78. Anything less will show their lack of seriousness. There is no point in calling it a betrayal after all the broken promises since 1994.

Traditionally, Sri Lankan voters have been motivated by multiple factors: the ethnic identity, class politics, party loyalty, caste prejudice, candidates’ likeability etc. But these factors have always been woven into an overriding wave of judgment on the performance of the government in power. Until 1977, voters generally and cyclically voted governments out of power and the opposition into power. The cycle has been wrenched up after 1977 in more ways than one.

The upcoming election next week is unique in that there is no one to be judged and thrown out of power. Aragalaya has already done that, and the Rajapaksas are now out of even contention. Ranil Wickremesinghe’s candidacy is also unique in that he doesn’t think that he should be judged for anything, but rewarded for saving the country from the Rajapaksa mess. The problem with that premise is that while he may have cleaned up the economic mess of the Rajapaksas, he has perpetuated their political mess.

For the first time, and uniquely as well, Anura Kumara Dissanayake is presenting himself as the spearhead of a new political force without past political baggage, and is appealing to the expectations of people to have an honest and efficient government. He has won over many people to his promises about the future, but what is not known is how many people are taking him at his word that his organization no longer has any of its old baggage.

There is not much that is unique about Sajith Premadasa, but he has emerged as a fortuitous beneficiary of the disintegration of the country’s traditional political organizations. Dissanayake and Premadasa are the acknowledged frontrunners, but they have distances to go to prove their political mettle both before and more so after the election.