Politics
Big Match: SJB versus UNP
Ranil Wickremesinghe’s return to parliament has been greeted with dismay and delight in various quarters. The timing couldn’t have been better for the UNP, and conversely worse for the SJB. Whether the government takes advantage of whatever impending division in the SJB his presence may lead to, we can’t really tell. Yet his return is significant, for two reasons: the rising unpopularity of the government, and the shortcomings of the opposition.
If the two appear to be linked, it’s because they are: growing dissatisfaction with the regime has translated into growing dissatisfaction with the opposition. The one has dovetailed and is dovetailing with the other. Wickremesinghe’s return, in that sense, symbolises a rift between not just the government and the people, but also the opposition and its past.
For the SJB, the challenge is clear. If it doesn’t clarify its position on key policy issues, and pose as a viable enough alternative to the government, there will be defections: not of MPs, perhaps, but of voters. It’s ridiculous to dismiss Wickremesinghe’s prospects because he has one seat in parliament. True, the UNP polled 
The problem is that it’s not the UNP that’s divided over the SJB, but the SJB over the UNP. If Mr Wickremesinghe’s return didn’t exactly polarise the SJB, those polarities showed up on social media. Thus while one SJB MP tweeted that he hoped Mr Wickremesinghe would help strengthen the opposition, another SJB MP noted, in a rejoinder to the tweet, that the four time prime minister would only strengthen the government.
The difference in opinion and tone between the two MPs points to a threefold division in the party: a pro Ranil faction, including those who subscribe to the ex-PM’s economic ideology and are not opposed to a coalition with him; a pro Sajith faction, including those who fought the Ranil Raj in the UNP; and a group of younger Turks, whose entry to the UNP coincided with the post-2019 struggle over the party leadership.
The UNP’s political heritage is distinctly neo-liberal: centre-right, if not right wing, affiliated with the International Democrat Union (which counts among its members the Conservatives in the UK and the Republicans in the US), and economically hawkish. Its attitude to the war, consistently doveish, makes it the perfect decoy and bogey for the SLPP. From 2000 to 2010, from Jaffna to Nandikadal, it spoke against the war; that it spoke for peace in the CFA years is at best a questionable claim, given Ali Zahir Moulana’s recent revelations about its role in the CFA, but it certainly opposed Mahinda Rajapaksa’s military excursions. That did not win it any favours from the general populace, despite a brief respite from 2015 to 2019.
Now the crux of the matter is this: while the UNP cannot escape its heritage, the SJB can. To do so requires a new way of thinking and strategizing, a new vision and mission, a new way of opposing the regime. That new vision cannot, and should not, be to the right of the party or personality it opposes; it should not advocate a return to the policies of the past, especially if those policies were roundly defeated at the polls.
There are three specific concerns the SJB must address here.
Firstly, Sajith Premadasa’s strategies may or may not have endeared him to ex-UNPers, yet despite the dismal depths to which the government has sunk, assuming that people who voted for the SJB in 2020 will do so again in the future would be unsound. I say this not because of the prospect of a Ranilist co-option, but because, having exited the UNP, Mr Premadasa more or less unleashed two genies: a populist (within his party) and an anti-Rajapaksist nationalist (43 Senankaya). Such divisions can be made use of by interest groups that wish to hijack the SJB. The latter, obviously, is in an unenviable position here,
Secondly, unlike the Mahinda Rajapaksa led Joint Opposition (JO), a populist faction from a centre-left party co-opted by the neo-liberal right, Premadasa’s project has almost millenarian overtones: the restoration of the parent party to a populist conjuncture.
Rajapaksa had a fairly recent era to wind the clock back to: 2005-2014. Premadasa has had to go back further, more than a quarter century, to the era he pledges to bring back through a new party. Since Sri Lankans have terribly short memories, Premadasa’s project appears to me more daunting, and more challenging, than Rajapaksa’s.
Thirdly, and most importantly, the SJB has failed to clarify its path. This has been on account of the criticisms it’s receiving from its UNP base, and from newer electorates.
The pro-UNP base accuses it of trying to imitate, or mimic, the SLPP. Cynical as it is, this assessment is pertinent, because critics of the SJB who once voted for the UNP contend today that, far from succeeding, Premadasa and his allies have failed to pose as an alternative to the government. Their criticism is basically grounded in accusations that the SJB has abandoned what are assumed to be its constituencies: middle-class suburbs, minorities, and civil society. In short, if it is trying to be more populist, to beat the regime at its own game, it is also, in the same breath, alienating the electorates that helped it get into parliament.
As for the “newer electorates” – Sinhala Buddhist peasantry and middle-class – it is widely and justifiably felt that they remain the monopoly of the SLPP. As such, any attempt to win these electorates can only be futile and counterproductive: futile because they will not budge from the SLPP’s stranglehold, and counterproductive because while failing to woo them, the SJB is losing its appeal among its UNP base. That minority parties in general, and the TNA in particular, have voiced concerns about the SJB’s turnaround on such matters as the ethnic question, devolution, and reconciliation, therefore says a lot about how its efforts at escaping its UNP past are perceived on both sides of the political divide: by former allies who accuse it of betraying its commitment to their aims, and by ideological enemies who view its efforts at winning new electorates as opportunistic, expedient, and futile.
None of this bodes well for the country’s youngest opposition party. Comparisons with the Joint Opposition flounder because, as I mentioned earlier, the SLPP had a recent time-frame which it could market to the public. For a quarter century, on the other hand, the UNP was associated with the ubiquitous figure of Ranil Wickremesinghe; despite his fine (if contested) legacy, Ranasinghe Premadasa came to power before many of us came of age. In that sense his son’s challenge is twofold: to market the SJB as a return to the UNP’s populist phase, and to steal the populist thunder from the government.
More than anything, however, the SJB must evolve a consensus on Ranil Wickremesinghe. To exclude him from everything would be fallacious; as fallacious as letting him dictate the SJB’s political trajectory. Unlike before, there is a healthy opposition to the UNP among SJB MPs, especially the younger Turks (as witness Rehan Jayawickrema’s video, posted days before Wickremesinghe’s return, in which he condemned him for denying young MPs a chance to rise) and older MPs like Ashoka Abeysinghe. There are, admittedly, MPs who swing to Wickremesinghe’s side, who see him as an ally: those on the Westernised, neoliberal, Ricardo Hausmann* wing of the SJB. But they are in a minority.
The truth is that Wickremesinghe faces a significant backlash from even liberals who fawned on him not too long ago. The truth is that he can, as a recent newspaper editorial puts it well, “play spoiler and irritant.” History has shown us that when the issue of the party’s leadership cropped up, he and his acolytes always preferred maintaining the status quo of the opposition to challenging the status quo of the government.
This is not certainly how a democratic opposition behaves. To Premadasa’s credit, the SJB is doing what it can to prevent a return to such a state of affairs. Hence to hope, as one MP did in a tweet, that Ranil Wickremesinghe will help strengthen the Opposition would be, as one commentator allied with Premadasa put to me the other day, “to make sure the Opposition remains in the Opposition.” It doesn’t get more ironic than that.
Note: Ricardo Hausmann is an economist associated with the neoliberal regime of President Carlos Andres Perez in Venezuela. He was courted by the UNP in the yahapalana years, and his input was incorporated in the controversial MCC agreement.
The writer can be reached at udakdev1@gmail.com