Will the next ‘president’ stand up, please? 

BY N Sathiya Moorthy-February 27, 2018, 12:00 pm

If anyone wants any proof that much of the nation’s polity is shocked beyond immediate recovery at the nation-wide local government (LG) poll results, it is here. Despite their long years as election analysts, whether or not they are parliamentarians and/or politicians, many of them have continued to harp on the LG poll percentages of individual political parties to argue that this man or that can or cannot become President again. Unwittingly or otherwise, former President Mahinda Rajapaksa is at the centre of many such claims, and most such counter-claims (that he cannot return to power).

Leave aside all talks centred on LG poll-percentages, under 19-A, Mahinda R just cannot contest a future presidential polls unless a favourable Parliament amends the Constitution all over again, for him to contest again. It is another matter after whether Mahinda would at all want to try his luck again, after his misadventure mission of January 2015, for which he got 18-A passed to let him contest the presidency a third time, and lost it, too.

It is even more doubtful if Mahinda R can ‘transfer’ all his votes from the LG polls to a third candidate, who does not have the hallow of war-victory around his head, now that brother Gota R has publicly acknowledged that his status as a US citizen bars him from becoming prime minister (hence, president, too). That is, even if such other candidate of his choice is either of the other brothers, namely Chamal R or Basil R, or going down the blood-line, parliamentarian-son, Namal R.

If someone was thus talking about Mahinda becoming prime minister under the existing system, that is a plausible question, for which answers have to be found within the present scheme, as long as all the allies pitted against him in the presidential polls of 2015 did not re-unite and are also able to create the ‘Maithiri magic’ of the times. Granted that the 44.69 per cent of vote-share in the LG polls gives Mahinda and the SLPP a seat-share advantage in any parliamentary polls (at least on paper just now), he can hope to become prime minister, yes, or post-poll, hope to have his nominee, named, instead.

Closest competitor, but..

In this, Mahinda’s closest competitor for prime minister, going again by the LG polls, should be incumbent Ranil Wickremesinghe of the ‘rival’ UNP. But if the Constitution were to be amended for Mahinda, and the two were to contest, Ranil with his UNP’s 32.61 per cent LG poll vote-share is way behind. With Sirisena-led SLFP’s 4.48 per cent and the larger UPFA’s 8.9 per cent (total 13.38 per cent), Ranil, would be marginally ahead of Mahinda, at 45.99 per cent, or 1.3 per cent more.

Less said about Sirisena’s chance, whether he contests the presidency with or without the UPFA’s support and as SLFP’s uncontested candidate. If against the assumption that all of SLPP’s LG poll vote-share are ‘transferrable’ for Mahinda to give it away to any candidate of his choice, and the UNP and the SLFP-UPFA were to bury the current bickering, then Ranil could stake claims to contest the presidency, and Sirisena would have no choice but to give in, even without a murmur of the present kind.

The real difference between the winner and the loser in the presidential polls of 2015 is not the vote-share of the present-day SLPP, which is more than the Mahinda-centric, Maithiri-led SLFP-UPFA vote-share (42.38 per cent) in the parliamentary polls of 2015, and not much less than the presidential poll figure (47.58 per cent) that he had lost earlier in the year. To think that a leader without his original party of decades, namely, the SLFP, and with no chance of becoming President in the future or even hopes of being prime minister in the current Parliament without engineering large-scale defections without being in power already (as he did as President in his first term), Mahinda has done creditably well. But it is only statistics, nothing more – just as it is nothing less.

Considering that the UNP contested alone (or with a few allies but not the official SLFP-UPFA) in the 2015 parliamentary polls, the party’s vote-share has taken a beating now, from the then figure of 45.66 per cent. An arithmetic possibility is that all of the SLFP and UPFA votes (totalling 13.38 per cent) has gone away only from the UNP’s 2015 parliamentary vote-share, bringing Ranil leadership’s LG poll figure closer to the residual 32.28 per cent (and very marginally higher at 32.62 per cent in reality).

‘Magic’ allies

Yet, none of this explains how Mahinda’s SLPP got more vote-share than in the parliamentary polls, so has the JVP, 6.26 per cent, up from 4.87 per cent. Definitely, it has not come from the TNA, whose vote-share has marginally gone down to 3.06 per cent now, from 4.62 per cent in the parliamentary polls. The TNA does not share the same constituency and region as either the SLPP or the JVP. More importantly, the TNA has enough local, Tamil claimants to its falling vote-share.

For the mathematical wizards who added up past poll figures to argue that Mahinda cannot make the presidency again in the same way have forgotten not only the constitutional bar, but also their own contribution to the defeat – and thus, UNP-backed Maithiri’s victory. The TNA, JVP, SLMC and all other Muslim parties, and also their Upcountry Tamil brethren (or, at least most of them other than the CWC under Arumugan Thondaman) were the chief architects of the Mahinda defeat – and thus, the consequent Maithiri victory. Yet, it is also some leaders from these parties, apart from select motivated campaigners from the UNP (thankfully not the SLFP-UPFA, as yet) who are pointing to the SLPP’s LG vote-share to argue how Mahinda cannot become president again (which the man too knows better, and may be planning to become prime minister instead, a la Russia’s very own Vladimir Putin).

Preferential votes

Minus Mahinda who cannot anyway contest the presidency again as such, and minus the possibilities of he being able to transfer everyone of the SLPP’s LG poll-share (44.69), if not his own losing presidential poll-share (47.58 per cent), who stands the best chance of winning the next presidential polls, whenever held but not later than January 2020. Guided only by the latest poll-figures available from the LG elections, Ranil stands the best chance, or so would it seem. And it is just that and nothing more.

Granting that the UNP nominates Ranil for presidency, and granting that Ranil too readily accepts such nomination, and granting that all subdued factions in the party work hard and together to have him at the top, whatever the reason and justification, he would still require close to 18 per cent vote-share from the current LG figure, to make it to the top. The theoretical question then remains if a Mahinda candidate with all transferrable votes could fill the gap (6 per cent from LG polls and three per cent from the 2015 presidential election) or Ranil with 32-plus per cent now, and 45-plus per cent from the parliamentary polls of 2015.

If the TNA does not vote Ranil (or any other UNP nominee, either) and it will not vote a Mahinda nominee anyway as things stand, and the JVP would not have the UNP for ideological reasons, whoever the candidate, where will the UNP’s extra votes for winning presidency come from? The Muslims, the Upcountry Tamils, or who? It is a million-dollar question for which no ready answers are available.

All these arguments pre-supposes the absence of two rounds of ‘preferential votes’ under the Sri Lankan scheme, if no candidate obtains more than 50-per cent vote-share in the first round. It is a trickier issue than acknowledged, and none of those that have since make presidential poll projections based on the LG poll figures, have cared to mention it, even in the passing.

It is even doubtful if any or all of the nation’s pollsters and those imported from overseas could at all predict the result / fall-out of a presidential poll, which is pushed into the preferential round. More importantly, all their projections (!) and predictions (?) derived from the LG poll results now are also based on the present turn-out (70 per cent), which is much less than the presidential poll turn-out of 81.52 per cent, and the parliamentary poll figure of 77.68 per cent.

Who then said that a president is ready in waiting, and it is anyone but Mahinda R, or all the Rajapaksas who have a dual citizenship, like brother Gota R? If anything, it is Maithiripala Sirisena now, and it could be anyone (else?) the next time round. It could be Maithiri again, if and only if he is able to convince the SLPP voters and the Rajapaksa clan that he would not do it again, and Rajapaksas too are able to ‘transfer’ all of their LG poll vote-share.

Amen!

(The writer is Director, Chennai chapter of the Observer Research Foundation, the multi-disciplinary Indian public-policy think-tank, headquartered in New Delhi. email: sathiyam54@gmail.com )