In Sri Lanka, a close three-way battle for office

Sri Lanka is no stranger to tumult. Yet even by the island’s standards, the years since 2019 have been a whirl. Through the course of the Easter Attacks, Gotabaya Rajapaksa’s disastrous presidency, the harrowing shortages of 2022, colossal protests that overthrew that president that same year, and the onerous conditions imposed by an International Monetary Fund (IMF) programme since, a long series of crises have shaken the nation’s politics.

In the presidential election today, Sri Lanka is set to choose between three major challengers. For the first time since 2005, a Rajapaksa is not among the candidates expected to seriously vie for the nation’s highest political office, that family’s political stock having crashed in the 2022 protests. In fact, it is their former voter base that has been among this election’s most vaunted prizes.

Chief among the beneficiaries of the Rajapaksa nosedive, is the National People’s Power (NPP), led by presidential candidate Anura Kumara Dissanayake. Although NPP is ostensibly a leftist alliance whose primary constituent is the Marxist Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP), the NPP has shuffled towards the centre in the past decade. The NPP/JVP (the terms are used interchangeably, even by supporters) has attempted to cast itself in a softer light than previous iterations of the party. In 1988/89, the JVP orchestrated its most recent violent uprising; in the aughts it supported major bombing campaigns of the mostly Tamil, North Sri Lanka.

Although Dissanayake’s vote share had only been 3% in the 2019 election, the NPP had, even then, enjoyed soft support in Sinhalese-majority electorates for its members’ full-throated condemnations of financial misappropriation. Since the onset of the economic crisis in 2022, it has positioned itself as the alliance best placed to fight corruption. Middle and lower middle class southerners have been most-receptive to this message. It is among these voters, particularly outside the urban centres, that Dissanayake, 55, has gained most ground.

Calls for “system change” led largely by youth through the 2022 protests, also explain the NPP’s rapid rise. “End the 74-year curse,” was among the demonstrations’ loudest demands with Sri Lanka’s two traditional parties (the United National Party and the Sri Lanka Freedom Party, plus offshoots such as the Rajapaksas’ party) accused of fleecing the nation in turns since Independence. The NPP/JVP, having never led a government, represent a clean break.

For other voters, however, this inexperience disqualifies them. In addition to those still scarred by the violence the JVP unleashed in previous decades, many are opposed to the NPP for their perceived fiscal naivety at a moment in which Sri Lanka scrambles to emerge from the most treacherous economic swamp it has been mired in. For many such voters, current president Ranil Wickremesinghe offers the only safe route to continued macroeconomic stability.

Wickremesinghe’s perceived command of global financial forces, diplomatic ties, and his decades-long brand as an internationalist statesman, has won him the support of the wealthiest urban voters, the likes of whom had been enamoured of JR Jayewardene, Wickremesinghe’s uncle and the first executive president of Sri Lanka. Tamils in the North and East have also long viewed Wickremesinghe as a benevolent politician in comparison to other Sinhalese.

However, in an election in which corruption faces a harsher examination than ever, Wickremesinghe leads a government in which a minister (later removed from his post) was charged with a brazen pharmaceutical scandal. In recent months, the Sri Lankan government was also accused of entering a corrupt agreement with Dubai-based visa administration company VFS Global. There have been other alleged breaches of public trust. A wind-power contract granted to India’s Adani group has come under serious scrutiny with a government regulator recently blocking approval while fundamental rights objections have been filed in court. The Central Bank Bond scam of 2015 is also linked to Wickremesinghe’s associates — he was prime minister at the time.

While Dissanayake is essentially the anti-establishment candidate, and Wickremesinghe is among the architects of that establishment, Sajith Premadasa represents the middle path for many. Himself the son of a former president, Premadasa has presented a welfarist vision, though one embedded within the existing political and economic structure. Sri Lanka’s opposition leader through the last parliamentary cycle, and a defeated presidential candidate in 2019, Premadasa has strung together a broad coalition of MPs. Many who had belonged to Wickremesinghe’s United National Party had already been his allies. To their number he has added others who had served in Gotabaya’s cabinet, as well as politicians representing minority communities. While criticised for his lack of charisma, Premadasa has emphasised the qualifications of his team, particularly in the realm of economics. These are primarily corporate figures, though many in his inner circle had also gained governance experience during the Sirisena-Wickremesinghe “Yahapalana” government that ran between 2015 and 2019.

The Rajapaksas, meanwhile, will also field a candidate, with Mahinda’s son Namal set to appear on the ballot. Though not expected to win a significant percentage of votes, his candidacy is indication that the Rajapaksas have designs on returning in greater force in years to come.

On the matter of an IMF programme, Dissanayake, Premadasa, and Wickremesinghe uniformly accept that only the IMF can chart Sri Lanka’s path out of immediate economic danger, though a second default on the nation’s huge debts still looms. Wickremesinghe would leave his current agreement with the IMF more or less untouched, Premadasa says he would adjust it to ease the burden on the poorest, and Dissanayake has called for more rigorous changes while insisting the IMF’s requirements would nevertheless be honoured.

Likewise, the candidates offer similar visions on foreign policy. With Sri Lanka in such dire economic straits it must court broadly for relief. The JVP was once virulently anti-Indian. However, earlier this year, Dissanayake met with India’s external affairs minister S Jaishankar, at India’s invitation. Dissanayake has also attempted to allay fears of the international community that the NPP represents a radical departure from the status quo.

In the final weeks of the campaign, Dissanayake appeared to have a narrow lead. But as may be expected in a three-way race, it is possible that no candidate will secure more than 50% of the vote. Sri Lanka’s electoral system does allow for this: If there is no clear winner, all but the two frontrunners are eliminated, and the second or third preferences of voters who favoured eliminated candidates are added to the leaders’ tallies. A president so chosen will take oaths with the weakest mandate of any elected executive president in the country’s history. More political instability may be on the horizon.

Andrew Fidel Fernando is an award-winning author and journalist based in Colombo.The views expressed are personal