Verdict in the ballot box

This newspaper is being printed on Friday night according to our normal schedule and subscribers would have received it while the voting is in progress. Even if it was printed a day later on Saturday night, it would not have been possible to report any result as the counting would have been going on when we went to press. It may have been possible to report voting trends if available and generally report how polling went on countrywide, hopefully without violent incidents. All citizen would fervently hope that the contest itself would be as peaceful as the run up has been up to the time of writing. So this comment is being written virtually blindfolded, as it were, if we may borrow that expression.

When campaigning ended at midnight last Wednesday, the widely held perception was that the fight was between three contestants, Anura Kumara Dissanayake, MP, Opposition Leader Sajith Premadasa, MP, and incumbent President Ranil Wickremesinghe in alphabetical order. How the race would eventually end is hard to call. The general opinion is that none of the front runners will be able to clear the 50 percent plus one vote barrier of total number of ballots cast and we will see a preference vote count for the first time since the executive presidency was created. The leading contenders, as is to be expected, are all blowing their own trumpets predicting victory for themselves.

Wickremesinghe is campaigning on a platform of continuity. He has been credited for restoring a degree of normalcy from the chaos of the Aragalaya period. By his own admission much more remains to be done and he is marketing himself as the man to do it. Many UNPers, such as those who have supported that party for generations and say their blood runs green, blame Wickremesinghe for the split in the party. Its dismal performance at the last parliamentary election in August 2020 can be easily attributable to the fact that while RW conceded the presidential ticket to Premadasa in 2019, he held on to the party leadership. Older leaders may remember this as a case of history repeating itself. When Dudley Senanayake lost to Mrs. Bandaranaike in 1970, he made JR Jayewardene the leader of the opposition but retained UNP leadership.

The result of the split was that the majority of the UNP MPs elected at the parliamentary election in 2015 went along with Premadasa and were elected on his Samagi Jana Balavegaya (SJB) ticket in August 2020. The fact that Wickremesinghe fared as badly as he did at that election was because most UNP voters went with the SJB and he was left with only the rump. The Pohottuwa, as the Rajapaksa’s Sri Lanka Podujana Peramuna (SLPP) is popularly known, has suffered a fate very similar to RW with a large number of its MPs defecting to the RW camp for Saturday’s race, while a lesser number have plumped for Premadasa. It is not rocket science that all these realignments target the parliamentary election that will quickly follow the presidential contest. Individual MPs are joining whatever camp that best serves their re-election interests.

The NPP/JVP or Malimawa (Compass) as it prefers to project itself has demonstrated awesome organizational skills during this presidential election campaign. It has established links within many segments of the population including doctors, lawyers, businessmen, academics, retired policemen and servicemen (including flag rank officers) with anecdotal evidence suggesting that it has won over people who would normally not vote for a party with the JVPs violent history and Marxists roots. This has been possible due to their ability to project that the JVP today is not what it was at a time when many of those who will vote on Saturday were not even born.

It is obvious that as former Ratnapura district MP Thalatha Atukorale, elected on the SJB ticket last time round, said when she resigned her parliamentary seat to link up with Wickremesinghe, that had there been no split in the UNP, the greens would have been in much better shape to take on the challenge from the NPP/JVP. She accused Premadasa of lacking patience to achieve his ambition of becoming president. Whether the various defectors, many of them bad eggs, can deliver votes to Wickremesinghe and Premadasa as they claim is debatable. The voters, hopefully, will decide for themselves which candidate they would prefer. They are able to wean the grain from the chaff of the barrage of propaganda that has hit them this past several weeks.

Our popular columnist, Rajan Philips, writing on this page has made many interesting points on various election related issues. These include what RW, the most experienced politician in the country today, would do if he is not elected. Would he fade gracefully into the sunset or would he remain to fight another day in the forthcoming parliamentary election? There have been many projections by pollsters, both local and foreign, on the outcome of the election. Astrologers too have had their say in television talk shows. The verdict will be in the ballot boxes on Sept. 21 and we should know by Monday, even if a preference vote count must happen, who Sri Lanka’s ninth president will be. Will he too, like many of his predecessors, welsh on the promise of abolishing the executive presidency?