Political polygamy

Editorial-February 2, 2015

President Maithripala Sirisena has said in a recent television interview that after winning the Jan. 08 presidential election he realised that the implementation of the joint Opposition’s 100-day programme was not possible without the SLFP’s cooperation in Parliament. The president, in spite of having unbridled executive powers, cannot function without parliamentary backing, he has maintained. He has thus sought to justify his securing the SLFP leadership a few days after winning the presidency as the common Opposition candidate.

Political marriages and honeymoons are not new to Sri Lankan politics. But, this is the first time we have seen political polygamy with both the government and the Opposition controlled by the Executive President!

One cannot be expected to be so naïve as to buy into the claim that before the presidential election, President Sirisena had been unaware of the fact that the executive president without control over Parliament was a virtual figurehead. It is not difficult to see that wresting control of the SLFP had been part of his strategy because he knew that there was absolutely nothing that he could achieve with the help of only the UNP as well as some SLFP crossovers in Parliament. That was why he kept on saying throughout the presidential campaign that he was still the SLFP General Secretary.

A politician who takes the trouble of contesting an election and winning is driven by a strong desire to exercise power and he tends to clear all obstacles in his or her path to achieve that end. That is the name of the game in realpolitik. After being elected President in 2005, Mahinda Rajapaksa engineered a string of crossovers from the UNP to consolidate his power in Parliament.

The late President Ranasinghe Premadasa famously declared in Parliament, when he was the Prime Minister under President J. R. Jayewardene, that he was as powerless as a peon in a government department. That was the time when the Old Fox was bragging that the only feat he could not achieve with the help of his unbridled executive powers was to make a man a woman and vice versa. This situation occurs only when both the President and the Prime Minister come from the same party. When they represent two different parties, the Prime Minister becomes more powerful than the President as was the case from 2001 to 2004 with Chandrika Kumaratunga as the President and Ranil Wickremesinghe as the Prime Minister. At that time, she even had to stomach many indignities at the hands of UNP ministers at Cabinet meetings which she chaired in her capacity as the head of government; one of them went so far as to demand that her handbag be checked as it was thought to be fitted with a hidden camera!

Now that President Sirisena has taken over the SLFP, his task will be to enable his party which stepped down at his behest to pave the way for his newfound allies led by the UNP to form a minority government to regain power.

In the aforesaid television interview the President said he would lead the SLFP parliamentary election campaign, but he would do so in such a way that the UNP would not be undermined. An election, however, is no friendly soft ball cricket match and the leader of a party has to enter the contest with the single-minded determination to win. Politics is all about power and a leader who baulks at going the whole hog to make his side emerge victorious runs the risk of facing revolts within his own party, especially when an alternative power centre exists. It is not possible for a party leader to run with the hare and hunt with the hounds in a fiercely contested parliamentary race.