A dream come true — for Ranil

Thursday 21st July, 2022

President Ranil Wickremesinghe is in seventh heaven. Everybody wrote him off when he lost the last general election (2020), having contested two presidential elections unsuccessfully in 1999 and 2005, and baulked at running for President in 2010, 2015, and 2019. He became the Prime Minister in May and President in July. But for his age, a jubilant Wickremesinghe may have turned cartwheels and somersaults on the parliament lawn when the outcome of yesterday’s vote was announced. Let him be congratulated!

The SLPP is cock-a-hoop, having scored a win, nay flexed its political muscles, in Parliament. Politically speaking, Diyawanna is fast becoming ‘Nandikadal’ for the Rajapaksas. Their power is now limited to Parliament, where they are putting up stiff resistance desperately.

President Wickremesinghe is lucky and unlucky at the same time, paradoxical as it may sound. He is lucky because he has been able to take a shortcut to the much-coveted presidency. He is unlucky because he has achieved his goal amidst the country’s worst-ever politico-economic crisis, which caused his elected predecessor to resign. All socio-economic factors that led to several popular uprisings during the past few months and the resignation of President Gotabaya Rajapaksa are still there. There has been a let-up of sorts in mass protests, but what we are experiencing at present could be the calm before the storm. The massive build-up of public anger remains intact, posing a grave danger to the unstable social order, which has to be restored for economic recovery to become a reality. The only way to defuse tensions in the polity safely is to eliminate the causes of the worsening economic crisis. This task cannot be accomplished without a significant increase in the country’s foreign currency reserves. There’s the rub.

President Wickremesinghe will be leading a government that lacks legitimacy. The resignations of President Gotabaya Rajapaksa and Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapaksa caused the current SLPP regime to lose its legitimacy. It is they who led the SLPP’s presidential and parliamentary election campaigns and secured popular mandates. The SLPP started fearing people long before they took to the streets. It betrayed its fear of the public by postponing the Local Government polls, last year. It has also been losing co-operative society elections, which are considered a barometer of popular support. Thus, President Wickremesinghe should not lose sight of the fact that he owes his win in Parliament yesterday to a bunch of rejected politicians, who are too scared to go before the people; their decisions do not reflect the will of the masses.

Parliamentary majorities do not necessarily translate into public acceptance and legitimacy. It may be recalled that the UNP-led UNF government mustered a working majority in the House and torpedoed the hurriedly-formed Sirisena-Rajapaksa government in 2018, but the UNP could not win a single seat at the general election that followed. The Rajapaksas had two amendments to the Constitution passed with a two-thirds majority each, but the 18th Amendment was deep-sixed in 2015, and the current SLPP government itself has undertaken to replace the 20th Amendment. In 2013, Parliament impeached Chief Justice Dr. Shirani Bandaranayake at the behest of the Rajapaksa family, but two years later the then President Maithripala Sirisena reinstated her; Wickremesinghe was the Prime Minister at the time.

The SLPP bigwigs, troubled by the smart of being unable to go on abusing power, stealing public funds and indulging in corruption, due to public protests, will seek to exact revenge by means of brutal crackdowns on anti-government protesters. They tried to pressure President Gotabaya Rajapaksa to grant their wish, but thankfully he chose to resign instead of unleashing the military on the protesters. One can only hope that President Wickremesinghe, too, will not give in to their pressure.

The SLPP MPs who voted for Wickremesinghe yesterday made a tremendous contribution to President Gotabaya Rajapaksa’s downfall. They are obviously salivating at the prospect of being able to make up for lost time. The biggest challenge before President Wickremesinghe will be to make good on his promises with the help of those elements, whose allegiance is to Basil Rajapaksa. Most of them are sure to demand Cabinet posts.

Almost all MPs who backed Wickremesinghe yesterday are from the SLPP, and he will be dependent on them for his political survival. The person who controls the ruling party is more powerful than the Executive President. It is Basil who has the SLPP under his thumb. Even President Gotabaya Rajapaksa, elected by 6.9 million people, was at the mercy of his sibling, Basil. President Wickremesinghe may be able to prevent himself from being overdependent on Basil by forming an all-party government so that a concerted effort could be made to rescue the economy and ameliorate people’s suffering, which finds expression in popular uprisings. But he will have his work cut out to rope in the SJB, the SLPP rebel group and the JVP-led NPP.

The Aragalaya is only the tip of the iceberg of public anger, and the incumbent regime is a mere battered bark with broken masts and tattered sails. This is something the new President should bear in mind if he is to avoid the fate that befell his immediate predecessor.