Presidential insecurity in spite of power and performance

by Rajan Philips

The political posturing over debt ‘optimization’ is just that. Posturing! Those who were waiting in anticipation for the President to order a crewcut to the local banks, are now howling that the banks have been let off with ponytails of profits while the working classes were not given the same concession by leaving their hard earned EPF contributions similarly untouched. A loss of depositor confidence in the banks, which any haircut could have triggered, would have been a far worse and instantaneous disaster than Gotabaya Rajapaksa’s organic fertilizer fiasco. The government to its credit would seem to have avoided it quite neatly.

Equally, the adjustments to the EPF’s returns on its bond savings will play over the long run and will have little or no impact on immediate retirees, or others retiring in the short term or even the medium term. In the long term, not to forget the Keynesian wisdom that most of us will be dead, the economy is supposed to be doing well for the living. That’s the premise for policy. There is no policy making assuming perpetual doom.

The politics over debt is turning out to be a victory for President Wickremesinghe. Once again the opposition in parliament is left playing catch-up. This has been the case ever since Ranil Wickremesinghe became caretaker President. Yet, for all his Teflon performances on the economic front, the President remains politically vulnerable. Unlike other politicians, however, he is quite aware of his vulnerability politically and more so electorally.

To wit, his indefinite postponement of the local elections, maneuvering the timing of the presidential election to his advantage, and playing chess games with provincial and parliamentary elections. He keeps most people guessing and his potential adversaries confused. Add to all this the recent changing of guards in the Election Commission under his direct oversight. Clever and proactive as these moves are, they are also indicative of the level of political insecurity the President harbours in spite of the near-monarchical powers that he effortlessly wields.

External Validation

Evidence of this insecurity manifested itself quite patently in the revelations President Wickremesinghe made in London, in the course of a seemingly soulmate chat with the former Canadian Prime Minister and arch conservative Stephen Harper. The President was en route to Paris for the global debt summit convened by middle-of-the-road French President Emmanuel Macron. He stopped over in London to attend the 40th anniversary event (June 20-21) of the International Democrat Union (IDU), whose current Chairman is Stephen Harper.

The fact that the President chose to reveal details about the last moments of the Gotabaya Rajapaksa presidency and the early moments of his own at the anniversary event of the IDU says a great deal about Ranil Wickremesinghe’s political sympathies and his craving for external validation. The transcript of the conversation released by the PMD in Colombo shows Mr. Harper confirming their ideological affinities straddling the global north-south divide and their mutual deification of the free run marketplace.

The International Democratic Union is the mutual admiration society of the Global Right that was created in 1983 at the height of the Reagan-Thatcher era in Western politics. The membership includes centre-right and rightwing parties, but the organization leans far more right than centre-right. The founding members were 19 conservative parties, 18 of whom were from the West and one from Japan. Prominent signatories included Margaret Thatcher, Helmet Kohl and Jacques Chirac. The main sponsors were Germany’s Konrad Adenauer Foundation and then US Vice President George H.W. Bush.

Today there are 84 members representing conservative parties from the Global South. Members from South Asia include the Bangladesh Nationalist Party, India’s Bharatiya Janata Party, the Maldivian Democratic Party, and Sri Lanka’s United National Party. The BNP is in opposition, the BJP and MDP are in government, and the UNP is listed in the IDU website as an alliance with one member out of 225 in parliament, not to mention the Executive President. I do not know when the UNP became a member of the IDU, but I do know that no other UNP leader has invested so much time and travel on the IDU as Ranil Wickremesinghe.

Stephen Harper became Chairperson of the Union in 2018 after his electoral defeat in 2015 and retirement from national politics. In October 2018, when Maithripala Sirisena created a home-made constitutional crisis and fired Ranil Wickremesinghe as Prime Minister, Harper as Chairperson of the IDU released a statement denouncing Sirisena’s unconstitutional misadventure and expressing solidarity with then Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe. Five years later, Ranil Wickremesinghe has become Sri Lanka’s first unelected (to parliament) President and had the occasion to recount to Stephen Harper in London the circumstances surrounding his sudden ascent to power after a crushing defeat at the hustings.

The Uncle and the Nephew

Stephen Harper is a dyed-in-the-wool conservative who took the Progressive Conservative Party of Canada that had traditionally been to the left of the Democratic Party in the US, all the way to the right of the US Republican Party. In international relations, he has been more hawkish than Thatcher and broke with Canada’s long foreign policy tradition of neutral middle power diplomacy observed by both Liberal and Conservative Prime Ministers. In internal Canadian politics, Harper used his conservative ideology to build support for his Party among immigrants from non-western countries by finding common cause with the inherently conservative and rightwing biases among swaths of the immigrant populations regardless of their racial or spatial origins.

Ranil Wickremesinghe is not a rightwing ideologue in the same mould as Stephen Harper, probably because of Sri Lanka’s political traditions involving a politically strong Left, politically and electorally strong centre-Left, and an all-party commitment to social welfarism. Before he became caretaker President, Ranil Wickremesinghe presented himself as an advocate of the ‘social market economy’ – a concept that was developed in West Germany after World War II, as a middle-of-the-road alternative between free-market capitalism and socialism. There hasn’t been much talk about the social market economy after RW became caretaker President.

On the contrary, the President has been using code words to blame social welfarism and socialism. To wit, blaming past political leaders for avoiding hard decisions and implementing policies that were popular with the voters; and making foreign policy decisions for partisan political benefits rather than to support national economic interests. For whatever reason, Ranil Wickremesinghe is not prepared to use the word socialism hypocritically, the way JR Jayewardene did in choosing the long title for the country: The Democratic Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka.

On matters of real policy and initiatives, however, there is no daylight between the uncle and the nephew. Even on the question of changing the system of executive presidency, Mr. Wickremesinghe has walked backed on his earlier promises and by positioning himself as a candidate for the next presidential election he is effectively cementing forever the practice of electing the President directly by the people.

What is more, Mr. Wickremesinghe is not content with saving the economy and reaping the reward of an elected term as President. He wants to change the contours of politics – by passing baleful laws, imposing stringent regulations, cultivating security forces to put down protesters, and bending the government machinery and independent commissions (like the Election Commission) to do his bidding.

If the President were to take care of the economy equally apolitically the national goodwill for him will spillover beyond political bounds. He would be venerated as the best caretaker Head of State and Head of Government Sri Lanka ever had. But inasmuch as Mr. Wickremesinghe tries to secure an elected term as President as his political reward for taking care of the economy, he is not going to be able to cash all the goodwill he might garner in his economic portfolio into large enough votes to win a presidential election.

Most of all, the President has no coherent political platform, he does not have the support of a cohesive political alliance, and he does not have a committed political following in the country other than due respect and apolitical goodwill for his handling of the economic situation. Sadly for the country, all of the above shortcomings of President Wickremesinghe are mirrored by his opponents and detractors. Between the two (the President and his detractors) there is no prospect for a positively radical breakthrough for the country.

The President has set a generous timeframe (till 2048) for the country to reach economic prosperity. But what is transpiring from one day to another – in terms of corruption, political meddling and dysfunctional institutions – is no different from what has been transpiring from the time the Rajapaksas got their collective hands on the levers of state power. The President is not interested in changing any of this. His opponents, on the other hand, are incapable of even holding the President accountable, let alone having the capability to change anything.