US Election Down to the Wire, Sri Lanka has Turned the Page

by Rajan Philips

In about ten days, on November 5, the US will have its quadrennial presidential election along with its biennial House and Senate elections. The presidential election is literally down to the wire, and the two candidates, Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, are fighting it out at the margins in the so called seven swing states. At the time of writing, it is a total toss up and there is no certainty about the outcome.

In a presidential election year, the American voters mark their ballots to elect their president for four years, a third of their 100 senators for six years, and all 435 members of the House of Representatives for two years. The elections to the Senate and the House are called the ‘down ballot races’, below the main presidential runoff.

Traditionally, voters used to vote the same way (either Democrat or Republican) up and down the ballot. Not anymore. And the candidates up and down the ballot are also vigorously minding their own races without too much of a co-ordinated effort to sustain a unified campaign.

Trump doesn’t care if the Republican Senate and House candidates are winning or losing. He only cares about his result for he needs to win the election to make sure that he puts an end to all the court cases against him. If he were to lose, he is more than likely to be convicted and jailed over one or more of the many charges against him.

Kamala Harris would normally be concerned with down ballot races to make sure that her party does well enough to gain control of both the Senate and the House for her to be effective and consequential as president. But with all the races being so tight, it has become a case of each one for oneself and money for all.

One ray of optimism is that if Vice President Harris were to win the election and see off Trump, it will also free the Republican legislators from Trump’s stranglehold and make a good number of them amenable to co-operate with their Democrat counterparts for passing critical legislation and authorizing funding for executive initiatives. That is the way, bi-partisan consensus in the middle, the American system has been working for nearly two centuries.

The scary and not at all unlikely scenario is the Republican jackpot – Trump winning the presidency and the Republicans taking control of both the House and the Senate. Trump will get rid of all the cases against him, and he will slash corporate taxes and create a deregulated environment for billionaire businessmen. Many of them led by Elan Musk are openly bankrolling Trump’s election campaign.

With a jackpot victory, the Administration will force Republican legislators to pass enabling laws to implement the loony agenda of ‘Project 2025’, the handbook of action items for Trump’s second term prepared by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank group. The Supreme Court with its super majority of conservative judges is well set up to give judicial cover to whatever the second Trump Administration may want to do.

Turn the Page

In another ten days after the US election, on November 14, Sri Lankans will be voting to elect a new parliament that will have to cohabit the island’s state with its new President – AKD. Cohabitation in presidential parlance refers to the situation in which the executive president and the prime minister in parliament belong to two different political parties. The implication is that a presidential-parliamentary system works best when the president and the prime minister are from the same party. When they are not, cohabitation will ensue with all the risks that it entails. That is the system that is in France that Sri Lanka has copied with expedient changes. The US system is different.

The late JR Jayewardene, the father and the mother of Sri Lanka’s presidential system, had a fondness for envisaging Sri Lanka’s new presidential system and the old parliamentary system evolving into being in a marital relationship. That presupposes the president and the prime minister belonging to same party. But JRJ did not quite pay much attention to the possibility and attendant risks of the two belonging to different parties. He may have tried to forestall this possibility by contriving to keep the UNP permanently in power, but his schemes ran out of steam after 17 years in 1994. And it has been a slow death for the UNP ever since.

President Anura Kumara Dissanayake is not facing the possibility of being a cohabitation president. His NPP is generally expected to win at least a simple majority (113+) in parliament. A two-thirds majority will be a far shot. But the same pundits who described AKD as a ‘minority president’ because he did not get more than fifty percent of the votes or even a majority of the second and third preferential votes, are now worried that the NPP may end up getting a two-thirds majority of over 150 MPs in parliament. Their fears stem from the total disarray among the opposition parties.

Sajith Premadasa who lost his second presidential election in succession to different opponents, just like his bête noire Ranil Wickremesinghe in 1999 and 2005, pompously declared himself as the Prime Ministerial candidate for the parliamentary election. An absurd assertion that only shows how the presidential ethos has corroded the institution of parliament even as presidential powers have subordinated the legislature to the executive.

Mr. Premadasa has since gone quiet because of internal dissension and lack of any external traction. It is the same with every other political party. They are all in disarray. Disarrays that have long been in the making and have now come to pass. The NPP is not the cause but the fortuitous beneficiary of the overall opposition disintegration. Regardless of all the forebodings about an AKD presidency and an NPP government, Sri Lanka is better off having AKD and the NPP in government than any combination of all of the others who were in the last parliament. It is a breath of fresh air as some of have been saying. The challenge is to keep the new regime going the way it has been so far.

It is still too early to make sense of how the results of the parliamentary election will turn out. But based on the September presidential election results and accounting for proportional allocation of seats in the 22 electoral districts including the National List of 29 MPs, the NPP should get around 93 seats in parliament and that would be 20 short of a simple majority.

With the general enthusiasm around the NPP after the presidential election and the opposition disarray, the NPP could conceivably get an additional 20 seats for a simple majority. Getting to 150 seats will need an electoral tsunami. For comparison, in the 2020 parliamentary election, the SLPP polled 59% of the vote and obtained 145 seats. Within four years the SLPP and the Rajapaksas have gone from heroes to virtual zeros. So much for the impermanence of power and the fickleness of parliamentary sweeps.

Turning to the opposition candidates in September, the votes polled by Premadasa and Wickremasinghe respectively correspond to about 75 and 40 seats in parliament. But the vote totals of Premadasa and Wickremesinghe at the presidential election include significant proportions of votes from the Northern, Eastern and Central provinces and they will not accrue to the SJB and (Ranil’s) New Democratic Front in the parliamentary elections. So, the SJB and the NDF will get fewer seats than 75 and 40, respectively.

Overall, the opposition parties should be able to garner over 100 seats in the new parliament. That would be entirely because of the system of proportional representation, and it will not at all be reflective of the political vibes in the country. In a first past the post system, the NPP would win a landslide majority, like the United Front in 1970 and the UNP in 1977. But the people and the country are tired of both parliamentary tyrannies and presidential dictatorship. The NPP is promising something different.

The uncertainty is about voter turnout. In the presidential election, the voter turnout dropped by 5% from 84% in 2019 to 79%. For a second election in as many months, the turnout is likely to be even lower. The turnout was 76% for the 2020 parliamentary election, an 8% drop from the 2019 presidential election. Even though the Covid pandemic was a factor in 2020, it should not be surprising if the turnout for October 14 drops to be in the low 70s%. With the NPP the most organized for mobilizing its turnout, a low voter turnout overall will be disadvantageous to the opposition parties.

There is also election fatigue among the people. Elections of one form or another have been anticipated for nearly two years ever since aragalaya drove Gotabaya Rajapaksa out of power. As interim president, Ranil Wickremesinghe tired everyone by playing games with election timing until he could not do anything about the timing of the presidential election. Ideally, the two elections could and should have been held together. That may have even saved some political bacon for Mr. Wickremesinghe. But he was always too clever by half, but cleverness alone does not win elections.

Vice President Kamala Harris has been pitching her campaign with the slogan to ‘turn the page’ after a decade of Trumpian politics in the US. Whether or not she will succeed remains to be seen. But Sri Lanka has turned the page quite effortlessly, so to speak. The bigger task now is to start writing the next chapter. That should start the day after November 14.