By Uditha Devapriya

At parliamentary elections in Sri Lanka last week, the centre-left National People’s Power (NPP) checked all lists and squared all circles, winning not just traditional seats but also polling divisions populated by minority communities.

Speaking to the media on Friday, November 15, hours after general election results were announced in Sri Lanka, Tilvin Silva, General Secretary of the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP), the dominant member in the National People’s Power (NPP) alliance that governs the country, acknowledged that his party would commit to “developing the country, eradicating corruption, and enhancing democracy with accountability.”

Silva’s remarks came in the backdrop of one of the biggest electoral landslides in the island’s political history: the NPP, reduced to three seats at the 2020 general election, gained a two-thirds majority, obtaining 159 seats and 61 percent of the vote, last week.

The achievement is all the more remarkable considering that the NPP secured a two-thirds majority without entering agreements with other parties. It also trumped expectations by winning seats in minority populated areas like the Northern Province, which had been written off as unfeasible and unwinnable for a party associated, rightly or wrongly, with Sinhala Buddhist nationalist politics. Yet by the early hours of Friday, November 15, it was clear not only that the NPP had won these areas but that they had displaced traditional communal parties: in the Tamil-dominated Jaffna district, for instance, the alliance secured three seats, while the once powerful Ilankai Tamil Arasu Kachchi (ITAK) obtained just one.

The NPP’s victory is also remarkable given that, at presidential elections two months ago, the party won with 43 percent of the vote. This led commentators, including supporters of the previous Ranil Wickremesinghe administration and the main Opposition, the Samagi Jana Balavegaya (SJB), to brand the new president, Anura Kumara Dissanayake, as a minority leader. At a rally, former President Wickremesinghe, who was appointed as president by parliament instead of a popular vote in 2022, compared himself to Dissanayake, stating that both were elected as presidents without majorities. As a former State Minister posted on Twitter on Friday, however, the results have made “a nonsense of the claims made about the President being a minority president.”

A record of Opposition parties

If supporters of the NPP were flushed with victory, they were fairly subdued in expressing their feelings. In Sri Lanka, the announcement of election results is typically followed by firecrackers and much celebration on the streets. On Friday morning – a Poya day, a religious holiday for Buddhists across the island – there was no such revelry. As the results came in, however, it was clear not only that the NPP had won, but that Opposition parties, including both those positioning themselves as moderate (such as the SJB) and hardline (such as the Sarvajana Balaya, or SB), had lost heavily. The SJB, for instance, which obtained 54 seats at the 2020 parliamentary election, slid down to 40 this time around.

For many Sri Lankans, there were other reasons to celebrate. The NPP rose through the ranks promising both change and a cleanup of the political system. Before the general election, a number of MPs associated with the previous government opted out of the race, choosing to retire from politics or return to other professions.

Yet a few among them chose to remain and fight – and lost heavily. Former President Ranil Wickremesinghe’s coalition, the National Democratic Front, secured three seats, while the much-hyped Sarvajana Balaya, led by a powerful media mogul, failed to obtain any. The Sri Lanka Podujana Peramuna (SLPP), led until 2022 by the ousted former president Gotabaya Rajapaksa, won two: Rajapaksa’s nephew and Mahinda’s son, Namal, has entered parliament through the party’s National List. He didn’t run for an elected seat Meanwhile, the People’s Struggle Alliance (PSA), a radical alliance of university students and activists which positioned itself to the left of the NPP, did not get through. As Harindra B. Dassanayake, co-founder of Muragala, a political research think-tank in Colombo, puts it, the results show that “Sri Lankans have spoken in one voice and placed their overwhelming trust in the NPP.”

Ever since September’s presidential election, a slew of analyses has attempted to ground the NPP’s victory solely if not mainly in its commitment to anti-corruption. The Western press, by and large, has echoed these sentiments, depicting the NPP as a Marxist-Leninist outfit committed to “clean” politics. However, Ramindu Perera, a political analyst who lectures at the Open University in Colombo, argues that this mischaracterises the NPP and overlooks its political and economic programme. In an article to Factum, a foreign policy think-tank based in Colombo, he frames the NPP’s victory as “the momentous rise of the populist left.” He also states that while anger at the then government did play a role in bringing the NPP to power, this alone does not explain why it could capitalise on the post-2022 radicalisation of the country more than other parties, including those on the Left.

The SJB’s underperformance

In the run-up to both presidential and parliamentary elections, claims of the NPP being hazy, idealistic, and impractical were fervently recycled by other parties. The SJB, for instance, portrayed itself as more committed to reform, contending that the NPP did not possess enough acumen to, for instance, negotiate with the International Monetary Fund. One leading MP from the SJB called the NPP “clueless” with regard to debt restructuring, and even dismissed the arguments of a group of economists critical of the IMF agreement, who visited Sri Lanka last May, as “conspiracy” theories.

It is clear that by making such claims, the SJB only admitted that it had no original, radical reforms of its own, and that it was content in pushing forward the policies of the previous government. The IMF agreement is widely reviled, especially outside of Colombo, and is associated with the Wickremesinghe administration, which brokered it. By defending the agreement and launching attacks on the NPP, the SJB managed to diminish its electoral prospects. That several SJB MPs and relatives of MPs engaged in red-baiting the NPP, making the most spurious claims, only worsened matters. While analysts supportive of the SJB’s leader, Sajith Premadasa, argued for a course-correction, the party paid little to no attention and instead focused on denigrating the NPP on the flimsiest grounds.

The SJB was also riddled by several internal tussles, which as political and foreign policy analyst Rathindra Kuruwita argues resulted in the party not being seen as a serious political player. The election results appear to have awakened the party: some have called for an internal inquiry and even a leadership contest. As a leading political commentator, Dayan Jayatilleka, puts it, if the SJB is to recover, it needs to do away with its commitment to the previous government’s economic reforms and position itself to the left. Ramindu Perera, however, contends that this is impractical, since the SJB is committed to the policies of the Wickremesinghe government regardless of the party leadership.

The NPP’s wooing of minority voters

If the NPP proved that it could both criticise policies such as the IMF agreement at election rallies while moderating its stances after winning elections – as of now, it has stated that it will not disrupt ongoing debt restructuring negotiations – it has also thumbed its nose at critics who claimed that it could not win minority votes. The NPP’s performance in the north and east, as Harindra Dassanayake observes, indicates that it has transcended “ethnicised electoral borders.” In polling divisions like Kopay, Kankasanturai, Nallur, Point Pedro, and Vaddukoddai, the NPP won with more 20 percent of the vote, pushing establishment parties from the south and the north to second or third place.

A number of reasons, including disenchantment with and fragmentation of older parties – particularly the Ilankai Tamil Arasu Kadchi (ITAK) – can help explain this trend. ITAK’s media spokesperson, M. A. Sumanthiran, who failed to secure a seat this time, attended NPP rallies and went so far as to say that his party would work with them after elections – even though the NPP declared it would not consider building coalitions with others. Nevertheless, a few days before the election, he questioned a decision by the NPP to bring in busloads of people from districts in the Northern Province to Jaffna, traditionally an ITAK stronghold, rather than going and directly talking to them. Such criticisms did not dent the NPP’s prospects among Tamils and only served to betray ITAK’s insecurities: while the latter won 33 percent in Jaffna in 2020, it obtained a little more than 11 percent this time around.

It goes without saying that the NPP’s performance with minorities – not just in the north and east but also in the Central Province, home to the country’s Hill Country Tamil population – has come as a shock to much of Colombo’s civil society circles. While we have yet to find out what drove these voters to support the NPP in large numbers, one can argue that while issues like land ownership and justice for those who died or went missing during Sri Lanka’s 30-year separatist conflict – a conflict for which the JVP, the dominant arm of the NPP, advocated a military solution – remain relevant, Tamils feel increasingly sidelined by old parties. The election of a hardliner to the leadership of the ITAK earlier this year, ITAK’s decision to field a common Tamil presidential candidate, and the later decision to enter an alliance with the SJB, reveals this only too well.

Shifting voting patterns in the north

However, it remains to be seen whether these voting patterns reflect a broader shift in Sri Lanka’s ethnic politics. Prior to the parliamentary election, JVP General Secretary Tilvin Silva accused Tamil political leaders of failing to resolve issues like land ownership and devolution of power. He added that ordinary Tamils did not prioritise such issues and that they mainly wanted “land and water for cultivation, a price for their produce, a place to sell, a school, a hospital.” Liberal commentators have critiqued Silva’s statement, noting that despite the predominance of economic problems, Tamil people still place high value on civil and political concerns such as those which Silva seemingly dismissed.

That ITAK performed less than expected even as the NPP made such statements, however, underlies a deficit in Tamil nationalist politics – one that can be seen, as political analyst Sivashanthi Sivalingam comments, in the rise of independent groups and candidates in the northern province, especially Jaffna. Indeed, many of these candidates have taken positions more hardline than either the NPP or ITAK. The NPP’s rise, in that sense, can be traced as much to disillusionment with elite politics as to a radicalisation of elite parties – as I have noted elsewhere. In the Muslim-dominated Batticaloa district in the Eastern Province, by contrast to the ITAK, and traditional parties like the Sri Lanka Muslim Congress (SLMC), fared better, though the NPP scored majorities in other districts in the region.

According to Rathindra Kuruwita, these shifting patterns show that the north has accepted the NPP as a “serious party.” While not dismissive of civil and political issues like land ownership, he contends that they underlie more concrete economic concerns, which he says parties like ITAK have failed to deliver on. “While Tamil political bigwigs have been accepted as representatives of their people by foreign embassies and governments and Colombo-based NGOs and civil society organisations, it is clear that they have been rejected by their communities.” As one observer has argued on Twitter, the lack of analysis on why the NPP won the north and east this time, versus the slew of commentaries when it failed to win either at presidential polls in September, shows that civil society in Colombo needs to think anew and afresh – especially in relation to minority politics.

Even before 2022, the NPP managed to galvanise opposition to establishment politics. In doing so, it became a key beneficiary of the post-2022 radicalisation of the country and the youth in particular. In the two months since it assumed the country’s presidency, the party has demonstrated that it can move to the centre on a number of issues. Contrary to what supporters of the former president and the SJB state, it has shown itself capable of handling matters of state as well, though it still is going through a learning curve.

More than anything, the NPP has won the trust of communities that have almost never been associated with it. As Omar Rajaratnam, a political and foreign policy analyst in Sri Lanka specialising in defence and public diplomacy outreach, states, “for the first time in 15 years, a president from a southern party was able to enter the north without facing protests and hostility from people there.” In the context of Sri Lankan politics, this is unprecedented and cannot just be put down to the party’s opposition to corruption. The key takeaway there is clear: Sri Lanka’s minorities have helped the NPP secure their biggest mandate yet. It is now up to the NPP, and its representatives, to honour that mandate.

Uditha Devapriya is a researcher and writer from Sri Lanka who currently works as the chief analyst of International Relations at Factum, an Asia-Pacific focused think-tank based in Colombo. He can be reached at uditha@factum.lk.

A version of this article was published by The Diplomat.