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Editorial

It ain’t over …

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Thursday 5th January, 2023

The Election Commission (EC) has stopped dilly-dallying and announced that nominations for the much-delayed Local Government (LG) elections will be accepted from 18 to 21 Jan., 2023. This is certainly good news. Some Opposition politicians are in seventh heaven. They brag that they have been able to put paid to the government’s efforts to postpone the polls. But it ain’t over until the fat lady sings. There is said to be many a slip ‘twixt the cup and the lip. The government is scared of elections, and will do everything in its power to postpone the LG polls, and how it will seek to achieve that goal remains to be seen.

There is no way the government can bring in a new law to postpone elections because such legislation affects people’s franchise and will have to be ratified by Parliament with a special majority and endorsed by the public at a referendum. But it can seek to change the existing laws to compass that end, the way it did in 2017, when it amended the Provincial Council Elections Act to put off the PC polls indefinitely. Speculation is also rife in political circles that the government has surreptitiously prepared the ground for submitting a Bill, seeking to prevent fund allocations for elections during the current crisis, on the pretext of rationalising its expenditure.

If the government succeeds in manipulating the parliamentary process to delay the LG polls further, the Opposition’s complaint that the EC has dragged its feet, giving the SLPP-UNP combine ample time to devise a plan to put off elections will be vindicated.

It will be a huge mistake for the government to postpone the LG polls again because such action will be tantamount to an admission of defeat to all intents and purposes.

The need for an election at this juncture would not have arisen if the SLPP had cared to form an all-party interim government with a time frame set for an early general election. Instead, it chose to retain its hold on power by electing Ranil Wickremesinghe the President and having him look after its interests. As SLPP General Secretary Sagara Kariyawasam has said, it is his party that is running the country because it has had President Wickremesinghe elected and controls Parliament. Corruption is rampant and power continues to be abused. The government does not give a tinker’s cuss about public opinion. The only way to knock some sense into its members is to subject them to an electoral shock. Hence the need for an election!

Elections are safety valves that help defuse tensions in the polity and thereby prevent political upheavals. Election postponements always entail disastrous consequences, as is our experience. In 1975, the SLFP-led United Front government postponed a general election by two years and became even more unpopular. The UNP obtained a five-sixths majority in 1977, as a result, and abused it in every conceivable manner. The J. R. Jayewardene government replaced the 1982 general election with a heavily-rigged referendum, and paved the way for the second JVP uprising. Had that election been held, people would have been able to give vent to their pent-up anger democratically; they would have simmered down, and perhaps, the JVP would have been able to secure parliamentary representation instead of taking up arms and plunging the country into a bloodbath.

If the incumbent government denies the people an opportunity to exercise their franchise, it will invite trouble; public resentment is rocket fuel that propels the masses into taking to the streets and adopting extra-parliamentary measures to engineer regime changes. A poll postponement will invariably create conditions for mass protests, which are bound to be far worse than the ones that led to the ouster of President Gotabaya Rajapaksa.

Let those who have allegedly undertaken to manipulate the parliamentary process to postpone the LG polls be warned that they will be held to account if violent protests grip the country and ruthless crackdowns thereon lead to bloodshed.



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Editorial

What’s up Basil’s sleeve?

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Friday 29th March, 2024

The political marriage of convenience between the SLPP and the UNP, two erstwhile sworn enemies, has lasted longer than expected. They have made numerous compromises along the way to prevent their uneasy union from collapsing, but never the twain shall meet on the question of which election is to be held first—presidential or parliamentary. They are pulling in different directions, like a bullock and a water buffalo yoked together, as a local saying goes.

None of the Rajapaksa family members will dare run for President this year for obvious reasons, and the SLPP cannot find an outsider capable of winning the presidency. Fielding a non-family member in the presidential contest is something the Rajapaksas are wary of; such a move will be infra dig for them. If they support President Ranil Wickremesinghe’s candidature, most of the SLPP parliamentary group members and organisers are likely to defect to the UNP, making their chances of averting an ignominious defeat at the next parliamentary election even more unlikely. It is the party of the winner in the presidential race that will have a better chance of winning the next general election. Hence, the Rajapaksas’ efforts to have a general election held first and obtain as many seats as possible.

The UNP has not regained vitality although its leader, Wickermesinghe, has secured the executive presidency fortuitously. All its candidates including Wickremesinghe were defeated at the last parliamentary polls (2020) and therefore they are not ready to face a general election first. They are riding on the coattails of Wickremesinghe, who hopes to leverage his political leadership for the country’s economic recovery efforts, to win the presidency. If a parliamentary election is held first, their plans will go awry.

SLPP founder Basil Rajapaksa’s attempts to make President Wickremesinghe agree to hold a general election before the next presidential contest have been in vain. However, there is another avenue open for him to achieve his goal. President Wickremesinghe will be left with no alternative but to dissolve Parliament if a majority of the MPs sign a resolution to that effect.

The SLPP, which Basil keeps under his thumb, has a majority in Parliament. Mustering the support of 113 SLPP MPs for dissolving Parliament, however, will not be a walk in the park for him. Some SLPP MPs who are still in the government have switched their allegiances to President Wickremesinghe. Most of the SLPP MPs are not sure of their re-election and therefore do not want a snap general election.

The SLPP and the UNP are at daggers drawn on the election issue, but their differences are not likely to develop into an open clash, which will be detrimental to the interests of both of them. Theirs is a symbiotic relationship. They are like a visually-impaired beggar carrying on his shoulders a fellow mendicant with a severe mobility impairment. The SLPP lacks vision and the UNP is politically crippled. Will they be able to work out a compromise formula over the election-related dispute?

It is difficult to get inside elusive minds. Both Basil and Ranil are given to lateral thinking and never do they hesitate to cut the Gordian knot to safeguard their interests. In an interview with Hiru TV, last week, Basil said something that could be thought to give a clue as to an alternative way out he is contemplating.

When Basil was asked by a Hiru journalist whether he did not think an early general election would clash with the next presidential election, he answered in the negative and added that it was possible even to hold both elections simultaneously. He is au fait with election laws and electoral affairs, and he would not have come out with something like that without reason. So, the question is whether the SLPP is planning to orchestrate circumstances and engineer a situation, where both elections will have to be held at the same time so that it can field a dummy candidate to run for President, and face parliamentary polls before the outcome of the presidential contest is known.

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Editorial

Reform political parties and their leaders, too

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Thursday 28th March, 2024

The government is going hell for leather to bring forth electoral reforms as if there were no tomorrow. It would have the public believe that the current electoral systems are full of flaws, which need to be rectified as a national priority if the country is to be put right and progress ushered in.

System bashing, as it were, has become the vogue in this country. Everyone is calling for a system change these days. Even those who have ruined the economy and enriched themselves at the expense of the public are doing so obviously in a bid to deflect criticism directed at them. A country doubtlessly needs robust systems in all sectors, but what Sri Lanka needs more than anything else, at the present juncture, is the restoration of the rule of law.

Former Chairman of the Election Commission, Mahinda Deshapriya, at a discussion on electoral reforms, the other day, rightly pointed out that unsavoury characters must not be nominated to contest elections. Minister of Justice and Constitutional Affairs Dr. Wijeyadasa Rajapakshe, PC, was also present at the event. In response to Minister Rajapakshe’s criticism of the current electoral system, Deshapriya said the problem of miscreants being elected to political institutions had to be tackled at source. He argued that the political parties had to refrain from nominating malefactors. One could not agree with him more.

All political parties conduct interviews to select candidates, and, therefore, it is the party leaders who have to take responsibility for nominating political dregs to contest elections. They must sift out miscreants at that point. This will be half the battle in cleansing politics and raising the standards of political institutions, especially Parliament.

Minister Rajapakshe argued that the rogues who were rich enough to throw money around obtained the highest preferential votes at elections. This argument is not without some merit, but there have been numerous instances where moneybags could not overtake other candidates in elections.

In the 2004 parliamentary polls, several members of the JVP, which contested as a constituent of the SLFP-led UPFA, came first in districts such as Colombo, Gampaha and Kurunegala. Obviously, they fared so well in spite of being outspent by many other candidates. Dullas Alahapperuma conducts very clean and inexpensive election campaigns, which are free from polythene, posters, cutouts, etc. He has disproved the argument that the Proportional Representation system has made election campaigns extremely costly. He wins handsomely in the Matara District. Why can’t others emulate him?

There is also a campaign against the preferential vote or manape, which is made out to be a source of evil. If it is scrapped, political party leaders will be able to nominate their favourites to contest elections and enable them to enter Parliament, etc., at the expense of the popular candidates who deliver votes to their parties. It was to prevent the party leaders from resorting to such arbitrary action that the preferential vote system was introduced.

At present, people can decide who should represent them by voting for political parties of their choice first and marking their preferences for candidates. If manape is done away with, the party leaders will have unbridled discretionary power to ensure that only their favourites are returned. Given the sordid manner in which they manipulate the National List by engineering vacancies to smuggle their loyalists into Parliament, how bad the situation will be in the event of the preferential vote being abolished is not difficult to imagine.

That the preferential vote leads to election violence, especially internecine intraparty disputes, is also a big lie propagated by violent characters in the garb of politicians. The JVP has been free from preferential vote battles because its candidates put their party before self. They are worthy of emulation.

The government ought to tread cautiously when introducing electoral reforms. The mixed-member electoral system under which the last local government elections were conducted in 2018 plunged the country into chaos with the number of local councillors doubling to more than 8,000. Now, efforts are being made to change the new system!

The need, in our book, is for the political parties and their leaders to be reformed more than the electoral systems.

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Editorial

Vulpine praise for a Trojan horse?

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Wednesday 27th March, 2024

The mere sight of a notorious pickpocket usually prompts people to check for the safety of their wallets or purses even if he is not looking for prey. The SLPP-UNP government has the same reputation as a cutpurse, and therefore the public tends to view everything it does with a jaundiced eye. Its recent undertaking to introduce electoral reforms has therefore triggered howls of protests from those who cherish franchise. The Opposition has accused the government of trying to put off national elections on the pretext of introducing electoral reforms.

Government politicians are full of praise for the proposed electoral reforms, which are widely seen as a Trojan horse. Minister of Justice and Constitutional Affairs Dr. Wijeyadasa Rajapakshe has sought to dispel doubts and suspicions in the minds of the public about the proposed electoral reforms. He has said they will not cause elections to be postponed. He may be telling the truth, but Sri Lankans usually do not believe anything until it is officially denied. So, the government will have a hard time trying to convince the public that it is not trying to postpone elections again. It ought to explain why it announced its decision to reform the parliamentary electoral system ahead of the coming presidential election.

The blame for postponing elections should be apportioned to all self-righteous members of the current Parliament as well as President Ranil Wickremesinghe. They have suppressed the people’s franchise on several occasions.

In 1975, an SLFP-led government postponed a general election by two years. It abused its two-thirds majority in Parliament for that purpose, and dealt a severe blow to democracy; resentful electors voted overwhelmingly for the UNP at the 1977 general election. President J. R. Jayewardene abused his steamroller majority in Parliament to cause a general election to disappear in 1982 by conducting a heavily-rigged referendum. He did so because he feared that he would lose his five-sixths parliamentary majority if a general election was held. Wickremesinghe was a Cabinet minister in that repressive regime.

In 2017, the UNP, the SLFP, the TNA, the SLMC, etc., voted for the Provincial Council Elections (Amendment) Bill, which helped postpone the PC polls indefinitely. UNP leader Wickremesinghe was the Prime Minister and SLFP leader Maithripala Sirisena the President at the time. The incumbent SLPP government postponed the Local Government (LG) polls, in 2021, on President Gotabaya Rajapaksa’s watch. The SLPP dissidents cannot absolve themselves of responsibility for that poll postponement, for they had not broken ranks with the SLPP administration by that time. The SLPP and the UNP postponed the LG polls last year by claiming that funds could not be allocated for an electoral contest owing to the country’s pecuniary woes.

In a previous editorial comment immediately after the announcement of the government’s decision to bring in new laws to elect 160 MPs under the first-past-the-post system and 65 MPs under the Proportional Representation, we pointed out that electoral reforms could entail long-drawn-out delimitation processes. Fear that it may not be possible for a general election to be held until the conclusion of the delimitation process pertaining to the proposed electoral reforms is therefore not unfounded.

The People’s Action for Free and Fair Elections (PAFFREL) has warned of the possibility of such a situation coming about. A government that fears elections will do everything in its power to postpone them. The SLPP-UNP regime is no respecter of public opinion and has no sense of shame; it therefore does not scruple to safeguard self-interest at any cost.

If the government is serious about allaying the people’s doubts and suspicions about the proposed electoral reforms, it will have to give a legal assurance that they will not lead to poll postponements. PAFFREL Executive Director Rohana Hettiarachchi has rightly called for the incorporation of a specific clause into the electoral reforms draft Bill, which is said to be on the anvil, to enable the Election Commission to conduct a general election under the existing PR system in the event of the delimitation process dragging on indefinitely. Nothing else will do.

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