By Shamindra Ferdinando

Former Director Administration, Parliament Lacille de Silva said that the presidential election results proved that MPs switching allegiance in the run-up to national polls couldn’t influence the electorate the way political leaders anticipated.

Had that been the case President Ranil Wickremesinghe wouldn’t have ended up third in the presidential race with less than 17.27 % of the total votes polled, the outspoken civil society activist said.

The dissident SLPP parliamentary grouping, including Premier Dinesh Gunawardena that backed the UNP leader must have realized their strategic blunder. Chief Government Whip Prasanna Ranatunga is on record as having said that “At the end the SLPP fielded two candidates, Wickremesinghe and Namal Rajapaksa, who secured the fourth place,” De Silva pointed out. Namal Rajapaksa polled 2.57% of the votes. The smaller breakaway SLPP group backed entrepreneur Dilith Jayaweera who managed 0.92% of the votes to secure the sixth place.

Lacille de Silva served as Director, Administration of Parliament from 2003 to 2013. The ex-House official said that several crossovers that had been engineered from the main Opposition SJB obviously didn’t have the desired results and declared that the combined SLPP group that backed Wickremesinghe couldn’t have suffered a far worse fate.

“Their often repeated boast of 6.9 mn votes at the 2019 presidential election is irrelevant now,” De Silva said, urging political parties represented in parliament to take tangible measures to bring an end to despicable practice of crossovers.

The major political groups had learnt the hard way that numbers in parliament actually didn’t reflect the true public sentiment, the one-time Secretary to the presidential corruption commission said. According to him, President Wickremesinghe’s running battles with the Supreme Court over a number of rulings, particularly the interim order to appoint an Acting IGP weakened his campaign. “The alleged online visa scam, too, cost the President dearly,” de Silva said, stressing that the Jathika Jana Balawegaya had only three seats in parliament at that time of the presidential election.

Even in the case of visa scam, the President found ways to circumvent court’s directives, De Silva said.Other political parties represented in parliament the SLMC, ACMC and TNA too suffered due to the failure on their part to take a clear stand at the presidential election, De Silva said.