The August 17 Election Countdown 

by Rajan Philips-June 27, 2015

In the end the dissolution of the current parliament came rather swiftly, though not unexpectedly. The actual timing of the dissolution and the dates for nominations, polling and the opening of the new parliament may have come as a surprise, and speculations are afloat about the dissolution timing. Even an early opinion poll results are doing the rounds, indicating that the UNP would come on top with the largest number of seats, followed by the still un-named group supporting former President Mahinda Rajapaksa, and the official SLFP alliance led by President Sirisena coming third. What will matter more than the ranking of parties will be the actual number of seats that each group will win, as well as the number of seats that other political parties will win, and what alliances will be forged in order to form the next government (with the desired 113 seats or more) and enable its leader to be nominated as Prime Minister.

Already, Kabir Hashim, the (new) Secretary of the UNP, has predicted 119 seats for the UNP based on the distribution of the 6.2 million votes garnered by President Sirisena in winning the January 8 presidential election. He might have meant a UNP-led alliance (perhaps the old UNA, or a new version of it) securing 119 seats, but even so a prediction of 119 seats seems a bit too optimistic. Besides, the UNP Working Committee is said to have decided to contest alone under its patented ‘elephant’ symbol, rather than as part of an alliance. That would mean that the UNP is not planning on an electoral alliance before the election, but is looking to form a governing alliance after the election with the UNP contingent, hopefully, being the largest and giving its leader Ranil Wickremesinghe much more power in parliament than he was able to wield leading the minority yahapalanaya government that has just been put out of its misery.

By their own actions in that short lived government, Prime Minister Wickremesinghe and the United National Party have lost much credibility as agents of good governance and will not have complete justification to campaign on that basis in the upcoming election. They could change all of that by coming clean with the people and sincerely laying out how they will do things differently from what they have been doing as government for the last six months, if they were to form a new government for the next six (or five) years. The albatross on their shoulders is of course the Central Bank scandal and it defies any and all political common sense that such an experienced political leader like Wickremesinghe would be so pettily obstinate in sticking with a manifestly wrong decision he made in regard to both the timing and the manner of the appointment of Arjuna Mahendran as Central Bank Governor. Not to mention the almost surreptitious manner in which the Prime Minister transferred the responsibility for the Bank from the Finance Ministry to his own ministry.

The Rajapaksa-opposition is of course not picking on these glaring irregularities in process, but on the technicalities of the bond auction and the Singaporean citizenship of Mr. Mahendran (which is really a ‘code’ for calling him a Tamil). The bigger issue is how unwittingly Mr. Wickremesinghe has created a distraction for the project of good governance and how wittingly insistent he is in standing by his creation. While there is much disdain among the traditional UNP supporters over the Central Bank scandal, there has been very little evidence of any internal questioning of the leader within the hierarchy of the UNP itself. Such a lack of internal questioning is not at all dissimilar to the manner in which the Rajapaksas governed the country. So where is the difference?

As for the former President, he is still floating speculative balloons – one day saying that he would form his own group to contest the election if he is not given an ‘SLFP ticket’ by the current President; and the next day insisting that he would contest only on a SLFP/UPFA ticket. The latter insistence could be a way out for him to stay out of the contest while letting his followers do the leg work of contesting either as part of the SLFP/UPFA alliance, or as a new third group of breakaway SLFPers and the smaller UPFA partners. The continuing efforts by the SLFP parliamentary old guard to get President Sirisena to allow his predecessor contest on the SLFP ticket are not likely to succeed. That would be to negate the results of the January 8 election, which President Sirisena cannot simply afford to do. A better strategy for the SLFP old guard would be to try to persuade Mahinda Rajapaksa to accept Mr. Sirisena’s offer to make him an eminent former President and provide advice and service to the Party and the country like the late Lee Kuan Yew in Singapore and Bill Clinton in the US. That should be a win-win for both men and the Party they belong to.

The good, the bad and the ugly

While the former President may not want to be accused in history of causing an irreparable split in the SLFP just to become Prime Minister, there are also other intrigues at play. President Sirisena has reportedly told the SLFP old guard that he was aware that the former President was keeping his connections to the UNP leadership alive and open. And that could only mean that Mahinda Rajapaksa and Ranil Wickremesinghe are back at their old game that only they can play to perfection. It also means that President Rajapaksa is more concerned about the legal troubles that encircle him and the members of his old regime on account of their alleged malpractices, and that they are a major consideration in his political calculations.

At one level the upcoming parliamentary election could be a political version of the old Clint Eastwood western: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, respectively representing, from the standpoint of good governance, the official SLFP alliance led by President Sirisena, the potential rebel-SLFP alliance with allegiance to former President Mahinda Rajapaksa, and the same old UNP alliance led by Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe. But the reality is that the qualities of being good, bad and/or ugly are unevenly distributed among all the political parties, and there are others besides the three main political groups. And they have their own priorities and differences. The ensuing alliance formation will be critical to the future of good governance inasmuch as one particular alliance might be more reliable for delivering on the promises of good governance than others.

Further, comparing electoral politics to a western movie, or horse racing for that matter, plays into the political pastime of looking for winners and losers, rather than analysing politics as the organization of alternative responses to emerging situations. Viewed from the latter standpoint, unlike the movie and its passive audience, the electoral process involves active participants who could and do pressurize political competitors looking for votes to bring out their best, or in certain circumstances even their worst, and everything in between, into contention for consideration by the voting public. Indeed, it is up to the electorate and the politically organized civil society groups to make the forthcoming parliamentary election a uniquely watershed event, unlike any of the 13 previous elections the country has seen over a span of 68 years. It is up to them to heed the poignant warning of Mr. Ariyawansa Ranaweera (The Island, June 24) and prevent the current slogan of ‘yahapalanya’ falling into the same fate of ridicule and dismissal that befell the term "dharmista", when it became the political slogan in 1977.