Features
Waiting for a Democratic Opposition
by Tisaranee Gunasekara
“The future is cloth waiting to be cut.”
Seamus Heaney (The Burial at Thebes)
The point had been made often enough. Without a Gotabaya Rajapaksa presidency, there wouldn’t have been an Anura Kumara Dissanayake presidency. For the NPP/JVP to go from three percent to 42 percent in four plus years, the system had to be broken from within by the very leaders entrusted with its care by a majority of voters. Gotabaya Rajapaksa achieved that feat in ways inconceivable even by his most stringent critics (who in their sane minds could have imagined the fertilizer fiasco?).
But President Dissanayake’s victory has two other fathers: Ranil Wickremesinghe and Sajith Premadasa. President Dissanayake won because the competition was so uninspiring. It was more a case of Sajith Premadasa and Ranil Wickremesinghe losing rather than President Dissanayake winning. While the NPP’s rise was meteoric, President Dissanayake failed to gain 50 percent mark of the vote. He is Sri Lanka’s first minority president.
As the IHP polling revealed continuously, all major presidential candidates had negative net favourability ratings; they were more unpopular than popular. The election was a contest to pick the least unpopular leader. Thus the winner’s inability to clear the 50 percent line.
This situation hasn’t changed qualitatively in the run up to parliamentary election. According to the latest IHP poll, President Dissanayake’s net favourability rating is still negative, which means more people regard him unfavourably than favourably. He and Harini Amarasuriya are at minus 10, the least unpopular of leaders. Sajith Premadasa at minus 31, Ranil Wickremesinghe even lower, lag behind not just President Dissanayake and Ms. Amarasuriya, but also the now retired Ali Sabry.
The NPP/JVP is likely to clock a bigger win at the parliamentary election even so, because the oppositional space is clogged by Mr. Wickremesinghe and Mr. Premadasa, with the Rajapaksas hanging on to the seams. The same actors representing the same unattractive futures. Compared to these prospects, a Harini Amarasuriya premiership would seem alluring to most Sri Lankans (she is an excellent choice, in any case, for the job).
President Dissanayake has avoided any obvious missteps in his first month. He is treading cautiously, especially in the economic arena, opting not even to tweak Ranil Wickremesinghe’s deal with a group of ISB holders, despite some unfavourable – and precedent-making – clauses such as giving bondholders the option of changing the law underpinning them from New York to England or Delaware; New York is about to pass a bill giving debtor nations greater bargaining power. He is no Gotabaya, at least economics.
In Sri Lanka, it is normal for the party that wins the presidency to win the parliament as well. In 2010, after Mahinda Rajapaksa won the presidential election, the opposition unity fractured. The UNP contested on its own and the JVP contested in an alliance with the defeated presidential candidate, Sarath Fonseka. In the presidential election, Mr. Fonseka had polled 4.2 million. At the parliamentary election, the main oppositional party, the UNP, polled only 2.4 million. Even after the votes for the Tamil and Muslim parties and the JVP/Fonseka headed DNA were factored in, this amounted to an erosion on a massive scale – 1.2 million votes.
In 2019, Sajith Premadasa polled 5.6 million votes. Yet his newly formed SJB polled a mere 2.8 million at the 2020 parliamentary election. Once the votes given to Tamil and Muslim parties and the UNP were factored in, this amounted to a bigger erosion, over 2 million votes.
Even the Rajapaksas could not buck this general trend in 2015. The UNP won the general election despite the much vaunted Mahinda Sulanga.
So the NPP/JVP winning on November 14 would be the norm. The only question is about the extent of that victory: would it be limited to a simple majority or something bigger, close to a two thirds?
A simple majority would be necessary to run an effective government. But a near two thirds victory would be a tragedy. Every time a Sri Lankan party won so big, disaster ensued in 1956, 1970, 1977, 2010 and 2020. Too much power not just corrupts but also stupefies. A future NPP/JVP government might be able to avoid the (financial) corruption trap. But if burdened with a huge majority the government will not be able to evade a blunting of senses, of growing blindness and deafness to public distress, of an addling of wits. Already, future ministers are shrugging off price hikes in such staples as rice, calling them normal. They might be but the dismissive attitude hints that the rot of indifference to public pain might have begun to set in already. In the absence of a strong, principled, and effective opposition, the rot will grow faster, to the detriment of all Sri Lankans, including compass enthusiasts.
Feudal ethos and tyrannical practice
To be fully functional, a bourgeois democratic system needs bourgeois democratic parties. Unfortunately, most Sri Lankan parties are feudalist in ethos and tyrannical in practice. We have a history of leaders treating their parties as private or familial property. The Rajapaksas are the most egregious example but they didn’t start the habit, merely took it to a new low. Senanayakes and Bandaranaikes preceded the Rajapaksas, both families treating dynastic succession as the norm.
When he became the leader of the UNP, J.R. Jayewardene made a clean break with that feudalist ethos. He delinked the UNP from familial politics and opened it to new blood, providing the space for the creation of a line of brilliant second level leaders. In 1977, he allowed the candidates for the upcoming parliamentary election to choose a steering committee to manage the campaign (in a secret vote). The man who topped that internal poll was made the deputy leader, Ranasinghe Premadasa.
Had Mr. Jayewardene won a simple majority in 1977, history might have turned out differently and better. But he won a five sixth majority. It didn’t take long for hubris to set in, making a man of undeniable intellect commit a bunch of avoidable mistakes and unnecessary crimes. And having obtained undated letters of resignation from all parliamentarians, Mr. Jayewardene ran the party like a dictator. Unlike the Bandaranaikes and Senanayakes, he didn’t crown his offspring. Instead, he turned himself into an uncrowned king.
Ranil Wickremesinghe opted for a dictatorial leadership style from day one. He gave himself the title The Leader, changed the party constitution to make it literally impossible to effect leadership changes, marginalised potential challengers and promoted untalented loyalists. He slowly abandoned the J.R./Premadasa UNP’s anti-feudal ethos, turning the UNP into a party where preferment was given to spouses, siblings and offspring of politicians.
As president, Mr. Wickremesinghe prevented the economy’s freefall and achieved a turn around. The NPP government’s decision to go the same route, at least for now, is a tacit admission of the success President Wickremesinghe achieved under extremely difficult circumstances. Yet, his me-or-deluge attitude to the UNP continued and continues. As president, instead of allowing a new young leadership to rebuild the party, he kept control of the UNP via discredited and deeply unpopular yes men. After his humiliating defeat, he clings to the party leadership.
Sajith Premadasa in this department is a veritable Wickremesinghe clone. He has suffered three national defeats, losing the presidency twice and the parliament once. Yet, like Mr. Wickremesinghe, he seems determined to cling to the SJB leadership even at the cost of running the party to the ground. He is also allowing his family into politics. Consequently, the SJB too has become a party unsuited to a bourgeois democratic system, feudal in ethos, dictatorial in style.
Anura Kumara Dissanayake won the presidency because the JVP understood its own un-electability and created a more electable cocoon as cover, the NPP. Sajith Premadasa and Ranil Wickremesinghe are incapable of even such minimal evolution. Like the woolly mammoths who couldn’t adapt to climate changes and were hunted extensively, their inability to adapt to the new political climate created by the NPP/JVP victory would drive their own parties to extinction. With no opposition to keep it on its toes, the government would succumb to hubris sooner rather than later.
The rest would be history. All too familiar history.
Somethings new, one thing old
What if J.R. Jayewardene did not commit the deadly mistake of banning the JVP on totally fabricated charges?
The JVP entered the democratic mainstream in 1977. From then till about 1983, the JVP was non-racist, trying to reach out to Tamils along the lines of class solidarity. It also treated the SLFP as its main enemy, and dreamted of becoming the main opposition (thus the famous lecture series: The Journey’s end for the SLFP). The JVP leadership maintained contact with some government leaders (especially Prime Minister Premadasa). When the opposition launched the general strike of July 1980, the JVP criticised the move and stayed out of it (the strike failed and the government sacked 60,000 striking workers). At a personal level, Mr. Wijeweera got married and started raising a family. These were hardly the actions of a party or a leader harbouring insurgent intentions.
Mr. Wijeweera’s abysmal performance in the 1982 election created a crisis in the JVP. The party’s reversion to a more Sinhala-oriented line was arguably a reaction to the shock of defeat. Yet going the armed revolution path was never on the JVP’s agenda even then. Had President Jayewardene not extended the life of the existing parliament (in which his UNP had a five sixth majority), the JVP would have contested the next general election (scheduled for 1983), won a few seats and settled down into standard parliamentary existence of reform and compromise.
Not only did President Jayewardene postpone parliamentary polls. He also banned the JVP. It was that criminal error which led to the second JVP insurgency (the insurgency’s racist, brutally intolerant nature was the JVP’s choice alone).
Perhaps President Dissanayake is where Mr. Wijeweera would have been had parliamentary election not been postponed and the JVP not been banned. Unfortunately, the JVP’s commendable evolution on matters economic has not been paralleled in the ethnic problem arena. The NPP was remarkably reticent on the subject in its tome-like presidential manifesto. Listening to the JVP general secretary Tilvin Silva indicates the reason. Behind a non-racist façade, the JVP is as regressive about the Tamil question today, as it was in the past.
“After 1970, our major political parties became provincialized gradually,” Mr. Silva said in a recent TV interview when asked about the NPP’s unimpressive electoral performance in the North and the East. “This allowed new forces to come into being in the North, the East, and the plantations… Tamil parties in the North, Muslim parties in the East, plantation parties in the plantations… So these parties decided on how to vote. For example, the people of the North did not vote freely. They voted according to what the TNA decided.”
Not a word about how the supposedly national parties alienated Tamils via discriminatory policies and violence actions, nothing about the disenfranchisement of Upcountry Tamils, Sinhala Only, the race riot of 1958, the standardization of university admissions in 1971 or the brutal attack on the Tamil Language Conference in Jaffna in 1974. Nothing of that history exists in the JVP’s universe, according to Mr. Silva. He admits to the existence of a language problem. The rest is reduced to water, markets, schools and education.
Perhaps the most telling is how he explains the land issue. “During the war some left their lands. Then they couldn’t return. Those who stayed back grabbed the land. Now when the owner goes back someone else is in occupation. So there’s a fight. So the government must intervene, set up land kachcheris and solve the problem.” Not a word about the continued military occupation 15 years after the war ended, the military’s ongoing attempts to grab more land or the road closures which hamper ordinary life. So like the Rajapaksas.
Mr. Silva accuses the Tamil leaders of talking about the 13th Amendment and devolution to protect their own interests. “But people on the ground don’t want 13; they don’t want devolution of power…” Even if that argument is granted, what about the thousands of acres occupied by the military? According to the JVP’s reading, do the Tamil people want their land back from the military, or not? Do they want their roads opened or not? Do they want justice for their dead or not? If the JVP cannot understand those basic demands and yearnings, if the best solution it can offer is administrative decentralisation (under a de facto military occupation), the NPP won’t make much headway in creating a Sri Lankan nation. If Sri Lanka’s road ahead lies between a Sinhala government and a feudalist autocratic (and ineffective opposition), the next five years are unlikely to be all that different from the last 76.
(First published in Groundviews)
Lesego Chombo‘s enthusiasm for life is as infectious as her achievements are impressive: she has won the Miss Botswana 2022 and Miss World Africa 2024 crowns, is a working lawyer, has set up her own charitable foundation – and made history in November, becoming Botswana’s youngest cabinet minister.
She was just 26 years old at the time – and had clearly impressed Botswana’s incoming President Duma Boko, whose Umbrella for Democratic Change (UDC) had just won a landslide, ousting the party that had governed for 58 years.
It was a seismic shift in the politics of the diamond-rich southern African nation – and Boko, a 55-year-old Harvard-trained lawyer, hit the ground running.
His main focus, he said, was fixing an economy too reliant on diamonds, telling the BBC ahead of his innauguration that he wanted young people to be the solution – “to become entrepreneurs, employ themselves and employ others”.
Key to this was finding a suitable ambassador – and Chombo was clearly it: a young woman already committed to various causes.
He made her minister of youth and gender.
“I’ve never been more proud to be young,” she told the BBC at the ministry’s headquarters in the capital, Gaborone.
“I’m a young person living in Botswana, passionate about youth development, gender equality, but also so passionate about the development of children.”
The beauty queen did not campaign to be an MP – she is what is called a specially elected member of parliament – and is now one of just six female MPs in the 69-member National Assembly.
Chombo said becoming an MP and then minister came as a complete surprise to her.
“I got appointed by a president who had never met me,” she said.
“Miss World and the journey that I thought I was supposed to pursue as my final destination was only the platform through which I would be seen for this very role.”
It was her crowning as Miss Botswana in 2022 that raised her profile and enabled her to campaign for social change, while trying to inspire other young women.
It also gave her the opportunity to set up the Lesego Chombo Foundation, which focuses on supporting disadvantaged youngsters and their parents in rural areas – and which she is still involved with, its projects funded by corporate companies and others.
“We strive to have a world where we feel seen and heard and represented. I’m very thrilled that I happen to be the very essence of that representation,” she said.
As she prepared for last year’s Miss World pageant, she said: “I really put myself in the zone of service. I really channelled it for this big crown.”
Now in political office, she is aware of the expectations placed on her in a country where approximately 60% of the population is below 35 years.
It also has a high level of unemployment – 28%, which is even higher for young people and women who have limited economic opportunities and battle systemic corruption.
Chombo said this was something she was determined to change: “Currently in Botswana, the rates of unemployment are so high.
“But it’s not just the rate of unemployment, it’s also just the sphere of youth development.
“It’s lacking, and so my desire is to create an ecosystem, an environment, a society, an economy in which youth can thrive.”
Chombo said her plan was to develop a comprehensive system that nurtured youth-led initiatives, strengthened entrepreneurship and ensured young people had a seat at the table when decisions were being made.
With Botswana’s anti-corruption policy undergoing a rigorous review, she said this would ensure that quotas for young entrepreneurs – when state departments and agencies put out tenders for goods and services – were actually reached.
The government has begun a 10-month forensic audit of government spending that will include 30 state-owned enterprises.
Indeed President Boko is intent on cracking down on corruption, seeing this as a way to bolter investor confidence and diversify the economy – something his deputy has been seeking to do on recent trips to the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Switzerland.
And a key deal has now been secured with UAE-based CCI Global, a provider of business process outsourcing, to open a hub in Botswana.
While youth development is a central pillar of her work, gender equity also remains close to her heart.
Her short time in office has coincided with a growing outcry over gender-based violence.
According to a United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) report, over 67% of women in Botswana have experienced abuse, more than double the global average.
“It hurts to know that it could be me next,” she admitted.
A month into her appointment, she was criticised for voting against an opposition motion in parliament to create “peace desks” at police stations and magistrate courts to quickly deal with victims.
At the time she said such provisions already existed within the law and what was needed was more public awareness.
This was followed in January by a police report noting that at least 100 women had been raped and another 10 murdered during the festive season – this caused public outrage with many lashing out at her on social media over the issue.
The minister reiterated – on several occasions, including before parliament in March – that Botswana had many laws and strategies in place and what was important was to ensure these they were actually applied.
But she told the BBC the government would be pushing for the implementation of a Gender-Based Violence Act, aimed at closing legal loopholes that have long hindered justice for survivors.
She said she was also advocating a more holistic approach, involving the ministries of health, education and local government.
“We want curriculums that promote gender equity from a young age,” Chombo said.
“We want to teach children what gender-based violence is and how to prevent it.
“It will boil down to inclusion of teaching gender equity at home, how parents behave around their children, how they model good behaviour.”
She has also been vocal about the need to address issues affecting men, particularly around mental health and positive masculinity, encouraging chiefs “to ensure that our patriarchal culture is not actively perpetuating gender violence”.
“I hear a lot of people say: ‘Why do you speak of women more than men?’
“It’s because as it stands in society, women are mostly prejudiced [against].
“But when we speak of gender equality, we’re saying that it should be applied equally for everyone. But what we strive for is gender equity.”
Chombo, who studied law at the University of Botswana, said she was thankful to her mother and other strong women for inspiring her – saying that women had to work “10 times harder” to succeed.
“[My mother] has managed to create an environment for me to thrive. And growing up, I got to realise that it’s not an easy thing.
“As women, we face so many pressures: ‘A woman cannot do this. A woman can’t do that. A woman can’t be young and in leadership.’ I’m currently facing that.”
She also credited Julia Morley, the CEO of Miss World, for helping her: “She has managed to create a legacy of what we call beauty with a purpose for so many young girls across the world.
“She has just inspired us so deeply to take up social responsibility.”
Chombo is serious about this. The beauty queen-cum-lawyer-cum-minister knows she has made history – but is also aware that her real work has only just begun.
“Impact. Tangible impact. That’s what success would look like to me,” she said.
“I want to look back and see that it is there and it is sustainable. That when I leave, someone else is able to carry it through.”
[BBC]
The conclave of 133 Cardinals, 108 of whom were appointed by the late Pope Francis from far flung parts of the world, needed only four rounds of secret ballot to swiftly settle on Cardinal Robert Francis Prevost as the new Pope. They could not have decided on a worthier successor to Pope Francis. The Chicago-born Prevost served as a lifelong missionary in Peru. Pope Francis made Prevost the Bishop of Chiclayo in Peru in 2015, and elevated him to the College of Cardinals eight years later in 2023. He was concurrently appointed as the Prefect of the Dicastery for Bishops, an influential position that looks after the appointment and guidance of Catholic Bishops everywhere.
This past February, the late Pope inducted Cardinal Prevost into the exclusive order of Cardinal Bishops. To Vatican insiders, this was a clear sign of “papal trust and favour” even though the two men of the cloth were not seen as always agreeing on everything.
Americans are lapping it up as the first selection of an American pope in history. Pope Bobby from Chicago. But an early news release from the Vatican would seem to have called Prevost the Second Pope from the Americas. It is Cardinal Prevost’s US-Peruvian dual national status that may have found a strong group of 18 cardinals from Latin America emerging as early supporters and facilitating the quick coalescing to achieve the required support of two-thirds of the cardinals.
The current diversity of the College would have certainly helped and many of the Cardinals apparently saw Prevost as one who would continue the legacy of Francis while reaching out to others who were not wholly inspired by the late pontiff. The new Pope demonstrated both continuity with Francis and a throwback to tradition in his first formal appearance, prayer and blessing from the balcony of St. Peter’s Basilica.
Unlike Francis who preferred the plain cassock, Prevost wore the traditional cape and the richly embroidered stole. He referred to his predecessor with genuine affection and respect and echoed Francis’ mission for “building bridges” in a world whose make up ought to be that of “one people.” More telling of the course of the new papacy is Prevost’s selection of Leo as the papal name and becoming Pope Leo XIV. More than 125 years after the last Leo, Pope Leo XIII (1810-1903) who was pontiff from 1878 to 1903 in a long and consequential papacy.
Two weeks ago, in my obituary to Pope Francis, I referred to Rerum Novarum (Rights and Duties of Capital and Labour), the celebrated 1891 encyclical of Pope Leo III. It became the first book of Catholic teaching on social issues. I briefly compared Rerum Novarum to Pope Franci’s 2020 encyclical, “Fratelli Tutti,” (Fraternity and Social Friendship). With the new pope becoming Pope Leo XIV, the new papacy offers the prospect for a new synthesis between the Church’s early teachings on social policy and the tumults of the contemporary world.
Pope Leo or Pope Bobby
Robert Francis Prevost was born in Chicago, in 1955, to parents of Italian, French and Spanish roots. He studied in a high school run by Augustinian priests belong to the Order of St. Augustine, one of the older religious orders in the Church founded by Pope Innocent IV in 1244, and named after the great Saint Augustine (354-430), an intellectual Berber from North Africa and later the celebrated Bishop of Hippo. Prevost went to Villanova University near Philadelphia and obtained a degree in mathematics in 1977. From there, he answered his calling, joined the Catholic Theological Union, an Augustinian seminary in Chicago, for religious studies and ordination as priest in 1981. Prevost became the first CTU alumnus to become Cardinal, and now he is the first Augustinian Pope in Church history. After Francis, the first Jesuit Pope.
At CTU, Prevost earned his degree in Master of Divinity and completed his Doctorate in Canon Law in Rome, at the Dominican University of St. Thomas Aquinas. It was the Augustinian Order that took Prevost to Peru as a missionary, and he has since shuttled between Peru and Chicago. His clerical vocation has combined missionary work, academic stints and administrative roles, including at one point being the head (Prior General) of the worldwide Augustinian Order with headquarters in Rome. As a Bishop in Peru, he won praise as “a moderating influence” between the squabbling factions of Peruvian Bishops who are divided between Liberation Theology, on the left, and Opus Dei, on the right.
Both in Peru and in Chicago, Prevost came under criticism for not acting strongly enough against priests accused of sexual abuse of children, but in both instances he was found to have acted properly by independent parties. Prevost also headed a successful diocesan commission for child protection in Chiclayo, Peru. As Cardinal, Prevost was also considered to be somewhat of an unknown quantity on the internally vexing issues of the church, viz., the ordination of women as deacons or priests, accepting same-sex unions, or allowing the Latin Mass. This may have diluted potential opposition to him by conservative cardinals. As a Pope from Latin America, Francis went farther than any of his predecessors. Given his dual US-Mexican status and experience, the new pope might go even further than Francis.
Outside of the Church, the College of Cardinals may have wanted to project both a missionary and an apostle for the faith, on the one hand, and a world statesman to speak to the secular issues of humanity, on the other. In selecting an American born cardinal as pope, the Vatican might be sending a message to both the church and the state of the United States of America. The new Pope will bring an alternative voice to debates in America over the rights of immigrants and their denial including deportation.
He could also be an antidote to the politically conservative sections of the American Church as well as the growing contingent of Trump’s MAGA Catholics, including some of the Supreme Court justices. Trump has welcomed the selection of an American Pope as “a great honour to the country.” His predecessors, Biden, Obama, Bush and Clinton have been more fulsome in their praises and their wishes for the new papacy. Regardless of politics, to many Americans the new pope could just be their Pope Bobby.
by Rajan Philips
More revealing than the results of the local government elections are the political reactions to them. There are as many interpretations of the LG election results as there are political pundits constantly looking to chip away at the still budding NPP’s political goodwill. More disturbing than any other world news is the flashpoint on the subcontinent with India and Pakistan seemingly spoiling for yet another border fight between them. For now, each side would seem to have served its military purpose and claimed victory. But belligerent rhetoric continues at the political level and in the social media that now includes the online expansion of the once stoic print medium.
The continuing rhetoric, including India’s for-now largely rhetorical threat to dam the downstream flow of the Indus waters to Pakistan, means that tensions in the subcontinent are not going to ease any time soon. With the current political changes in Bangladesh souring the relationship between Dhaka and Delhi, India is now flanked east and west by recalcitrant neighbours. The landlocked Himalayan countries aside, Sri Lanka might be India’s only friend now in South Asia. Sri Lanka can comfortably sit on the fence, to borrow Jawaharlal Nehru’s felicitous phrase, mind its own business and grow its exports, while avoiding the fruitless diplomatic forays of the 1960s and the non-alignment rhetoric of the 1970s.
Who won the LG Elections?
The answer depends on who is replying. So, here’s mine among several others. One regular commentator in an English newspaper admitted to harbouring reservations that the election of an NPP government may have taken Sri Lanka to seeing the last of a free and fair election in the country. So, with great relief he announced that regardless of the election results the NPP had “passed with flying colours” the test of the “commitment to multiparty democracy”. Not at all funnily, the commentator also asserted that his reservations were “not an unfounded fear, as the experience in many countries, where political fundamentalists or the militant left had won national power, has almost uniformly revealed.”
That in fact flies in face of history of many countries where electoral democracy has been threatened by political fundamentalists of a different kind or militants of the other hand. The darkest current example is of course the US, where an elected president is unabashedly trying to upend the oldest constitutional democracy in the world. Until the Supreme Court put an end to it India’s central governments, especially when Indira Gandhi was Prime Minister, frequently ran roughshod over the functioning of electoral democracy at the state level. Mrs. Gandhi infamously tried that even at the centre by imposing Emergency Rule in 1975.
In Sri Lanka, Prime Minister Sirimavo Bandaranaike, President Jayewardene and President Ranil Wickremesinghe have used different methods to postpone or cancel elections. As for fairness and freeness of elections, it is the (parliamentary) political Left in Sri Lanka that has been their most consistent guardians from the two national elections and the infamous Dedigama by-election before independence, to every election held after independence. It has also been the hallmark of the Sri Lankan Left not to challenge an election result in court.
The JVP emerged as the antithesis to parliamentary democracy, but over the last 20 years it has mellowed, evolved and expanded as the NPP into a practitioner of parliamentary democracy. The JVP’s violence is past, and no one has accused the JVP/NPP of resorting to violence, corruption, vote-purchasing, or vote-impersonation to achieve electoral wins. It is not the best in every political aspect, but it is certainly far better in many aspects than every other political party. And at a time when politics is quite turbulent in many countries including our three large neighbours, Sri Lanka is quite even-keeled. While the people and the voters of Sri Lanka deserve a ton of credit for Sri Lanka’s even-keeled status at present, the NPP government also deserves due credit, perhaps far more than any of its predecessors this century.
Apart from giving credit to the NPP government for not subverting elections and for facilitating political stability, let us also look at some of the interpretive questions that have been raised about the results of the LG elections. There is a hugely feigned surprise that the NPP fell far short of the 61.56% vote share it got in the 2024 parliamentary election and dropping to 43.76% in Tuesday’s LG election. What is conveniently unmentioned is that the voter turnout also fell from 69% in the parliamentary election to 62% in the LG election. In the September 2024 presidential election, the voter turnout was a high 79% and President AKD polled 42.31%.
A parallel take on the election is to compare the results this week and those of the February 2018 LG election that was won by the newly minted SLPP. The point that is emphasized is that the SLPP won that election from the opposition while the NPP fought the recent election with all the resources of the state at its disposal. The fact is also that the UNP and the SLFP then in an unholy tandem government fought the 2018 LG election with all the state resources they could muster and still came up woefully short.
That might be beside the point, but the real point is that the voter turnout in that election was a high 80% and the SLPP polled 40.47% (not 44.6% as mistakenly noted by some), the UNP 29.42% and the SLFP 12.1%. The still more relevant point is also that the NPP polled 5.75% in the 2018 LG election and is now at 43.76% in 2025, while the SLPP has slid from 40.47% in 2018 to a paltry 9.19% in 2025. The combined SJB (21.69%) and UNP (4.69%) vote total share of 26.38% is also lower than the 29.42% share that the then undivided UNP managed in 2018.
In terms of seats captured, between 2018 and 2025 the NPP ballooned from 434 seats to 3,927 seats while the SLPP has shrunk from 3,436 seats to 742 seats, while the SJB that was unborn in 2018 has managed to win 1,767 seats in 2025. The SLPP won 231 Councils in 2018 and has zero councils now, while the NPP has grown from zero Councils in 2018 to winning 265 Councils now, although it is not having absolute majority of the seats in all the Councils where it has won the largest number of seats. The SJB with 14 Councils is actually placed third after the ITAK with 35 Councils, but only 377 seats and 3% of the total vote. The abnormality is the manifestation of the relative territorial advantage of the ITAK, which is also more illusive than of any practical benefit.
Who Lost in the North & East?
The LG electoral map displayed by Ada Derana (and copied here) is splashed up by just two colours: the ITAK’s purple bordering the northeast coastline and bulging into the Kilinochchi and Mullaitivu districts, while the rest of the island is a mass of NPP red, with sprinklings of SJB yellow here and there including Mannar.
Much has been made of ITAK’s return to electoral supremacy in the north and east, reversing the NPP’s landslide success in the November parliamentary election. It has also been suggested that inasmuch as the NPP government and President AKD personally invested heavily in their campaign in the two provinces, the results are a repudiation of their efforts to woo the Tamils and expand the NPP base in the North and East. I for one see the results quite differently.
Of the five northern districts, the ITAK swept three – Jaffna, Kilinochchi and Mullaitivu, but the NPP came second in all three of them. The NPP also came first in both Mannar, which was actually a three-way split between the NPP, SJB and the ITAK; as well as Vavuniya, where the NPP and the SJB shared the spoils leaving the ITAK to hold on to the Vavuniya Urban Council only. In the Eastern Province, NPP won Trincomalee and Ampara, while the ITAK held on to Batticaloa – the only district that the NPP lost in the parliamentary election. So, it is more even-stevens than repudiation of any kind.
There are two other aspects to the northeast results. The pre-election writeups in the Tamil universe focused more on the challenge to the ITAK from the other Tamil parties than its contest with the NPP. Specifically, parties and alliances involving the ACTC and DTNA were expected to outperform the ITAK and even challenge the latter’s leadership in Tamil politics. Whether he was being set up as a strawman or not, the LG elections were fancied to propel Gajendrakumar Ponnambalam as the next Tamil leader filling the void left by the late R. Sampanthan. Those expectations have been frustrated by the election results. The ITAK is still the ‘accredited’ (AJ Wilson’s term) Tamil political party, and it has put its detractors in their place. As well, the ITAK may find it more congenial to work with the NPP than collaborate with its Tamil competitors.
What is remarkable at the national level is that the NPP is the first political party in Sri Lanka’s history to systematically try to establish itself spatially and socially, in every part of the country and among all sections of its people, and it is now showing some consistent rewards for its efforts. What the Local Government electoral map is showing is that the NPP came first in all the red areas and second in all the purple as well as yellow areas. That is something that should be celebrated and not cavilled at as repudiation in the North and East.
What is also noteworthy at the national level is the disarray of the opposition parties in comparison to the political discipline shown by the NPP. Going forward, the NPP must hasten to add tangible results that are commensurate with the people’s goodwill that it continues to command. In the absence of an effective opposition, the government may want to consider setting up its own sounding boards of independent people to provide criticisms and suggestions on the performance of individual ministers and the government as a whole. Perhaps the current system of parliamentary committees could be used to provide forums for consistent public interventions. Without a mechanism for public feedback and responsive changes the government may lose itself in the intoxication of its own rhetoric. The NPP could and should do better. And the country deserves even better.
by Rajan Philips
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