Presidential blusters and legislators’ ire

Wednesday 26th March, 2025

The Opposition has taken umbrage at President Anura Kumara Dissanayake’s talkathon, as it were, in Parliament last Friday, when the final vote on Budget 2025 was held. Some SJB MPs have claimed that the Chair had their microphones switched off so that the President could hold forth uninterrupted, and he used the budget as an excuse for haranguing the House. The government MPs have sought to counter this argument. They insist that President Dissanayake, as the Minister of Finance, only exercised his constitutional right to address the House on the final day of the budget, and there was nothing wrong with it whatsoever.

There have been numerous instances where the legislature became a captive audience for the Executive Presidents—and even loquacious Prime Ministers and Opposition Leaders. Sri Lankan politicians have a propensity to talk nineteen to the dozen just to hear their own voice. However, there is more to the recurrent argy-bargy over presidential grandstanding in Parliament than the Opposition’s aversion thereto; the tendency of the Executive Presidents to subject the legislature to their loquacity can also be seen as symptomatic of the erosion of the separation of powers.

What has fuelled the ongoing campaign for the abolition of the executive presidency is that the Presidents tend to act like harum-scarum private bus drivers when they have control over Parliament. They tend to bulldoze their way through. The situation becomes even worse when the Presidents’ parties happen to have supermajorities in Parliament.

The Executive Presidents are compelled to act with some restraint when parties other than their own gain control over the legislature, as evidenced by the experiences of President D. B. Wijetunga from August to November 1994, President Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga from 2001 to 2004, and President Maithripala Sirisena from October 2018 to November 2019. Presidents J. R. Jayewardene, Mahinda Rajapaksa and Gotabaya Rajapaksa, by virtue of being the leaders of the ruling parties with supermajorities, reduced the Legislature to a mere appendage of the Executive. President Ranasinghe Premadasa also did likewise although his party did not have a two-thirds majority in Parliament. This unwholesome practice has continued over the years without a hiatus.

The constitutional requirement that the Executive Presidents attend Parliament once every three months, along with their power to address the legislature and hold Cabinet portfolios, has enabled them to dominate—if not undermine—the legislature. Some Presidents have leveraged their power to address Parliament to project their authority and overshadow legislators. One may recall that the last Parliament had the then President Ranil Wickremesinghe walking in, making speeches, and even asking some Opposition MPs to shut up.

The JVP, a bitter critic of the executive presidency, has pledged to abolish it. Its leaders made their support for Mahinda Rajapaksa in the 2004 presidential race conditional to his pledge to scrap the executive presidency. He, true to form, reneged on his promise. The JVP was also instrumental in having the 17th Amendment and the 19th Amendment to the Constitution introduced to curtail the powers of the Executive President. The 21st Amendment, which did away with some of the presidential powers, restored by the 20th Amendment, was also introduced partly due to JVP’s pressure exerted through Aragalaya (2022). Unfortunately, the Constitutional Council, which was created to fetter the excessive executive powers of the President, has become a rubber stamp for the Executive.

Today, the JVP has a two-thirds majority in Parliament and boasts of having expanded its support base across the country. Curiously, not much is heard about its pledge to abolish the executive presidency.

During an interview with the government-controlled ITN, on 04 Dec., 2024, in answer to a question about the JVP’s promise to scrap the executive presidency, JVP Central Committee member, legal advisor and Deputy Minister Sunil Watagala, said that the JVP/NPP leaders would not be able to conduct another presidential election campaign ‘with their clothes on’ as they had pledged to abolish the executive presidency on a priority basis.

Whether the JVP/NPP leaders will care to carry out their promise to abolish the executive presidency expeditiously or make another Machiavellian about-turn and conduct their party’s next presidential election campaign—with or without their clothes on—remains to be seen. What they should do urgently is to ensure that the President not only respects the doctrine of the separation of powers but also is seen to do so by refraining from subjecting Parliament to boastful bluster and snide remarks. They laid into the previous Presidents for haranguing Parliament, didn’t they?