by Rajan Philips

The first part of the title needs no elaboration. The second part is an unfolding question that has many answers to it, and which one of them will eventually prevail also depends on multiple factors. Objective circumstances, agency roles and subjective leadership moves are all at play. The simplest way to exit in politics is to resign. No amendment, no majority, or no referendum is needed.

The last President, Gotabaya Rajapaksa, unwittingly established a new precedent in Sri Lankan politics when he resigned from office after running away from it. All that said, Sri Lankans could also be thankful to Mr. Rajapaksa for leaving the way he did, unlike say Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel whose belligerence has created the most explosive situation for the region and the world in the 21st century.

No one is expecting President Wickremesinghe to resign before his carryover term from his predecessor is over. But there are plenty of speculations and suspicions about Mr. Wickremesinghe’s political intentions and the tricks that he might play to extend his stay in power. When it comes to elections, no matter what elections, no one has a clue about what the President is going to do. The truth is even the President may not be knowing what he is going to do, because he is constantly looking for winning conditions for him to call an election.

The tricks he plays!

For Ranil Wickremesinghe, winning conditions are hard to come by. Absolute power has come to him late in life, but there is no assurance of winning an election in spite of his powers and even after such a long time in politics. The alternative to not winning an election is not to have an election. Or keep changing election timing to improve winning chances. President Wickremesinghe has been trying everything. And he has everyone else chasing whatever election rabbit he pulls out of his scheming cap.

He cancelled the local government elections without saying anything about it, while letting everyone else agitate over it. He floated the idea about provincial council elections to keep everyone guessing. He got his sidekicks to spread rumours about advancing the presidential election even though as an interim president he is not entitled to do so.

Then came suggestions that he might try to advance the timing through a constitutional amendment. That was a dead end move because there was never going to be two-thirds majority support for it in parliament, where the opposition parties have been clamouring for parliamentary elections to be held after local government elections.

The one power that the President now has is to dissolve parliament and have new parliamentary elections. Mr. Wickremesinghe will not do that because he cannot put together a winning coalition, and the MPs who are supporting him in parliament now are scared to face an election. So, he opens a new window for distraction – electoral reforms, which have now taken a life of their own with the gazetted appointment of a Presidential Commission that is tasked to complete its work before April, unwittingly, but also fittingly for April Fools day, 2024!

In between came suggestions for abolishing the presidency, because the President is said to have figured out that he is not likely to get more than 50% votes on the first count, and he is not going to be high in the second or third preferences of those who are not going to vote for him in the first place. Put another way, Ranil Wickremesinghe is not the first, second or third best presidential candidate to a majority of Sri Lankan voters. That seems to be the assessment of all the president’s men. Hence the move to abolish it, as the last resort.

Mr. Wickremesinghe has played the abolition card before – in the dying days of the yahapalana government, when he suggested abolition after the UNP decided on Sajith Premadasa as its presidential candidate for the November 2019 presidential election. It became a laughing proposition then. Even Mangala Samaraweera laughed out loud.

This time, Anura Kumara Dissanayake has made a brilliant counter proposition that a constitutional amendment to abolish the ‘executive presidency’ should be coupled with the dissolution of parliament leading to a new general election.

The election itself could be coupled with a referendum on abolishing the executive presidency. To be clear, abolishing the executive presidency means only removing the elected presidency and reducing its powers to those appropriate for a head of state in a parliamentary democracy. To be clear as well, such a reform of the presidency should not require a referendum, as argued expertly by Dr. Nihal Jayawickrama in the Sunday Island last week.

Even so, there will be no harm in piggybacking a referendum question on presidential reform during a parliamentary election. A clear referendum result will put an end to a very longstanding question. In any event, the abolition kite never took off, let alone flew.

Finally, the nation, or nations, heard from the horse’s mouth that there will be elections, that is the presidential and parliamentary elections as and when they are due. Addressing the Special General Convention of the United National Party at the Sugathadasa Indoor Stadium in Colombo, last Saturday (October 21), President Wickremesinghe reportedly “outlined the timeline for upcoming elections in line with the constitutional provisions” – presidential election in 2024, followed by parliamentary elections, and local government elections in the first half of 2025. One would think that the President was not merely repeating the constitutional timeline for presidential and parliamentary elections which most people know, and that he was implicitly confirming that the two elections will be held as they come due.

Many are understandably skeptical and unsure if the President is being sincere or whether he is pulling another fast one. Like how he shooed away the local government elections. The sudden appointment of a new, nine-member commission on election reforms headed by former Chief Justice Priyasath Dep, certainly reinforces people’s skepticism about the President’s sincerity.

The specific tasking of the commission to make study the potential for enabling concurrent representation in both the parliament and the provincial councils is yet another example of Mr. Wickremesinghe’s presidential panache for making seemingly innovative, but which are in fact nonsensical suggestions. This might be the reason why there seems to have been no mention of provincial council elections at the UNP convention. There may not be any mention of them at all until we find out if the President is serious about enabling elected representatives to be concurrent members of both the parliament and the provincial councils.

Smart Dekma

Let us look at it another way. The theme of the UNP convention was “Smart Country – 2048.” One would have thought that country has seen the last of such cliches after the sensational collapse of Gota’s “Saubhagyaye Dekma” nonsense. Now we have the new Ranil version – Smart Country 2048, in pure English. Thankfully, it is not being splashed across the country as the Gota prototype was.

That is also because the UNP now is mostly a one-man state show. It does not have the prop up of 6.9 million who voted for Gotabaya Rajapaksa or 5.5 million who voted for Sajith Premadasa. Put another way, Smart Country has little chance of blossoming into a winning national platform.

My point here is something else. 2048 is the President’s target year for Sri Lanka reaching economic self-reliance and take off. With all the focus on the digital, the take off could turn out to be a virtual one. To make this a real one many concrete steps and short flights will have to be taken for the next 25 years starting from now. But we haven’t heard anything by way of a concrete plan or program from the President. Nor has the President demonstrated that he is assembling a political team that is worthy of the grand economic project that he claims he is launching.

There is nothing transparent about the team the President might be having outside parliament. And everything is transparent about the team of MPs that he has in parliament – their corruption, incompetence and their becoming increasing unelectable. The President has not articulated anything about whether the current political system and the institutional machinery are adequate for the grand purpose of delivering economic liberation by 2048.

Nor has there been any hint of what might come after him, for after all he is not expecting to be around till the day of deliverance in 2048. All that the country has had from him, politically speaking, is one trick after another to scupper one election or another. The last of them is the President’s recitation of the election timeline at the UNP convention.

So, it is understandable that there are criticisms and concerns that the President is pulling another fast one on the people. And the political counter to the President’s manoeuvres and machinations has already started. The time for fast ones is over, and there should not be any more postponement of elections. The President’s manoeuvres are likely to be countered both within parliament and outside parliament.

The opposition parties could request the Election Commission to make early announcement of election timelines – voter registration, nominations, and polling date, to keep the pressure on the President not to cancel or postpone the presidential election or the parliamentary election. The forthcoming budget process and debate could be used to ensure that sufficient funds are allocated for the two elections, and to get repeated commitments from the President that there will be no budgetary excuses to cancel or postpone either the two national elections.

Next to resigning or retiring, the most straightforward exit from power is electoral defeat. Ultimately the people will decide if President Wickremesinghe deserves to stay in office beyond the five year term for which Gotabaya Rajapaksa was elected in November 2019. Mr. Wickremesinghe’s best argument for the people’s vote is that he has managed to restore economic stability from the chaos that was handed to him. But the stability that he is now presiding over is tenuous at best and will not be sustainable when the country starts repaying its debts.

He may have deserved an extended stay in power to look after the economy if he had just done that – look after the economy without playing tricks with elections. Instead, President Wickremesinghe has been using and abusing the power of his office either to avoid facing the electoral test or to bolster his electoral prospects. Now it is time the people got their turn to exercise the power of their vote to say who shall be the next President or who will form the next government.