Election time is always a period when existing political alliances are put to the test and new partnerships are fashioned. That is exactly what is happening, even with presidential and general elections being more than a year away.
The government of national unity headed by President Maithripala Sirisena, representing the Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP) and Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe leading the United National Party (UNP) has been an uneasy alliance, barring the initial few months when everything was hunky-dory in the first flush of President Sirisena’s election victory.
However, since then, the relationship between the two parties have been strained with the motion of no-confidence against Prime Minister Wickremesinghe being its lowest point. After the motion was defeated in Parliament with UNPers rallying around their leader, the UNP insisted that those ministers who held office in the government and voted for the motion should leave it.
President Sirisena relented to that request and the net result is that now, there are four main political groupings in Parliament: the UNP, the mainstream SLFP loyal to President Sirisena, the Joint Opposition (JO) aligned with former President Mahinda Rajapaksa and a so-called ‘Group of Sixteen’ who left the government after the motion of no-confidence but remain as a distinct entity, without formally joining the JO.
Sirisena and Rajapaksa factions
Thus, the SLFP has now fractured into three groups and last week saw the possibility of the ‘Group of Sixteen’ splintering further, with four persons in the group indicating that they still retained their loyalty to President Sirisena, while the other dozen parliamentarians in this group preferred to stand with Rajapaksa and the JO.
These four- former ministers S. B. Dissanayake, Dayasiri Jayasekera and Dilan Perera and former Deputy Speaker Thilanga Sumathipala- are pursuing their own agenda which is to seek a rapprochement between the Sirisena and Rajapaksa factions of the party, even though the latter are now busy strengthening their own political party in the form of the Sri Lanka Podujana Peramuna (SLPP).
Speaking to the mainstream media, Dissanayake, a former General Secretary of the SLFP during the Presidency of Chandrika Kumaratunga who also spent some time in the UNP, has outlined his vision. He envisages a scenario where President Sirisena will contest the next presidential election as the nominee of a unified SLFP, with Rajapaksa as his virtual ‘running mate’ as the prime minister in a potential SLFP-led government.
“We would never condone any political deal with the UNP in the future. We firmly believe that we would be in a position to set up administrations in all provincial councils, elect our own President and form a government on the results of the three forthcoming polls. Anyhow, if we need the help of any other political party, we would turn to minority parties but never to the UNP,” Dissanayake was quoted as saying.
UNP-SLFP alliance
The thrust of Dissanayake’s argument is that the mainstream SLFP finds itself in a political predicament now because it aligned itself with the UNP. Dissanayake, of course, chooses to ignore the fact that the UNP-SLFP alliance was a necessity at the time and that he himself was a member of that unity government until recently.
The more pertinent question is how Dissanayake can sell his proposal to the Rajapaksa camp and the SLPP. Buoyed by its success at the local government elections where it swept the board and relegated the mainstream SLFP to a distant third place, the SLPP is busy planning its own presidential election campaign and former Defence Secretary Gotabhaya Rajapaksa is being projected as the front-runner to be its candidate.
The other issue is whether Dissanayake- and the likes of Jayasekara, Perera and Sumathipala- have enough political clout to convince the SLPP to enter into a political partnership with President Sirisena who ousted Rajapaksa from office in January 2015.
It is also highly unlikely that the SLPP will want to play second fiddle to President Sirisena in a future government because he still wields significant executive powers under the Constitution and has demonstrated during his current term of office that he isn’t shy to use them.
The different aspirations of the SLPP and the SLFP also came into sharp focus last week when the SLPP continued their agitation for provincial council elections. Polls are already due for councils in the North Central Province, the Eastern Province and the Sabaragamuwa Province.
However, they have not been held because there is no agreement on whether they should be conducted on a hybrid of the first past the post and proportional representation (PR) systems or on the PR system alone.
Elections for the remaining six provincial councils will also be due in the coming months- and if elections are not held, the government stands to be accused of postponing polls because they are ‘running scared’.
At a recent party leaders’ meeting, the UNP, as well as the JO, agreed on polls to be held for six provinces in January next year. The UNP’s thinking is that, because provincial councils have to be held anyway before the presidential and general elections, the party would be better off conducting them early. That would provide them with an ideal opportunity to assess the mood of the electorate. In the event of a less than optimal performance, it would also give the party to rethink strategies and regroup.
However, the mainstream SLFP is yet to endorse the proposal to conduct elections in January. It is true that the new delimitation of electoral districts has not yet been completed and is, therefore, a stumbling block to conducting elections immediately.
Executive Presidency
However, critics point out that if all parties agree, it is a simple exercise to bring about an amendment to the legislation passed with a two-thirds majority in Parliament that would enable polls to be conducted under the previous PR system, if necessary for this election alone. That the SLFP is unwilling to do so is an indication that it is fighting shy of facing a contest, these critics argue.
It is also interesting that President Sirisena is yet to declare himself as a candidate for the next presidential election. It will be recalled that he had publicly pledged several times that he would not run for President again and had in fact promised to abolish the Executive Presidency. However, the President has embarked on a series of high profile development projects, launching them first in his home turf of Polonnaruwa, thereby almost confirming speculation that he will indeed run again for President in 2020.
There has even been conjecture that he could call an election earlier than January 2020 by which date a presidential poll must be held. The Constitution does allow him to call for a premature poll and indeed the ‘surprise factor’ could work to his advantage because other parties including the UNP and the SLPP are yet to formally announce their nominees for the contest.
Considering that the potential nominee from the SLPP, Gotabhaya Rajapaksa, also has to renounce his United States citizenship- which is a process that may take a period of time to complete- a snap election that catches the President’s rivals off guard cannot be ruled out.
For its part, the UNP has been content to go about its business of running the government and has launched its own programmes with an eye on the polls, most notably the ‘Gamperaliya’ projects. However, the series of crippling strikes that have swept the country in recent months have not been to its advantage and the party hierarchy is aware that it still has a long way to go to re-establish voter confidence. It can, however, be thankful that it is not beset with the kind of infighting and factionalism seen in the SLFP and the SLPP.
The coming months will see a sharper demarcation of political battle lines with the glorious uncertainties of political alliances coming into play, perhaps as never before in the country’s recent history.
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