by Rajan Philips

It is no exaggeration to say that no previous Sri Lankan political leader has achieved what Anura Kumara Dissanayake accomplished this week. His leap from 418,553 (3.16%) in 2019 to 5,634,915 (42.31%) and victory in 2024 – a 14-fold jump in five years – is in itself unprecedented, not only in Sri Lanka but likely also elsewhere. More importantly AKD did what he did without the proverbial political spoon in his mouth. Up till now everyone who achieved high political office in this country had a feudal head start and/or got an early seat on the political party train that was always on a track to the station of power. Those tracks are still there, but the old trains have been cannibalized through the corruption and nepotism of their operators.

The long and short view

In my view, there are two sequential aspects to AKD’s historic win – one immediate and the other long term. In the more immediate sense, it certainly helped AKD that the last person to win a presidential election before him arrived with a political foot in his mouth. The voting story of this election is that with the implosion of the Rajapaksas following the disaster of the Gotabaya Rajapaksa presidency, the contest became a race between three candidates – AKD, SP and RW – for the 6.9 million votes that Gotabaya Rajapaksa polled in 2019. AKD beat the other two hands down.

The overnight conventional wisdom is that AKD benefited from the vote split between SP and RW, and that if one of them had given way to other AKD would not have won the election. The vote tallies and distributions between 2019 and 2024 do not quite support this assessment. On the contrary, the distribution of votes seem to show that in a two person race against either SP or RW, AKD would have polled over six million votes and still won the election.

In the longer historical view, as opposed to the immediate post-Gota context, I would argue that AKD’s historic success is a testament to the resilient possibilities of Sri Lanka’s political system and culture, and it gives the lie to the hyped up narrative that the country has been an unmitigated basket of failures for all the 76 years after becoming independent in 1948. That nothing good ever happened in 76 years. This is an obvious exaggeration, if not a patent falsehood.

While this narrative was a part of the NPP’s campaign and could at least partly be justified as normal election rhetoric, some of the commentating fellow travellers of the NPP took the narrative to absurd limits and flew in the face of the same history that some of them learnt and even taught in our schools and universities.

Put another way, AKD’s victory is proof that things can work in Sri Lanka, and that nearly a century of state welfarism and the progressive political ethos that sustains it have enabled vast cross-sections of the Sri Lankan society to improve their living conditions and life prospects, and to inspire committed individuals like Anura Kumara Dissanayake to emerge as leaders and succeed in democratic politics at the highest level.

Nor should there be any denying that all of Sri Lanka’s progressive ethos is the main achievement of the country’s left movement from the 1930s, the same movement that schismatically gave birth to the now victorious NPP’s own progenitor, the JVP, among so many others along the way. All of this is not to diminish AKD’s impressive achievement, but to applaud it.

No one on the left has come anywhere near to achieving political power that Anura Kumara Dissanayake has now achieved. On the one hand, those who took the parliamentary path to achieving socialism did so in spite of their sharing the same social advantages with many on the political right. On the other hand, those who spurned the parliamentary path as a bourgeois dead end, made no headway in spite of pursuing a violent route that only brought more grief and not much good.

To the credit of Anura Kumara Dissanayake, he has demonstrated that the left can contest and win an election without the old vehicle of the united front or the new bandwagon of a multi-party alliance. And more remarkably, he has demonstrated that it is possible to succeed within the democratic electoral process, and that turning to violence is not necessary for achieving political ends.

Promising First Steps

All the same, achieving electoral victory is only the start of the political journey and not the end of it. Especially when political goals are inspired by the common good and not driven by private or familial gain. Making private gains and promoting family interests through political means is easily achieved and in short order. Pursuing the common good, both substantive (as in resurrecting the economy) and procedural (as in reforming the constitution), on the other hand, involves a long and grinding journey that requires a team of equals and friendly rivals, but all having the discipline, dedication, and the necessary skills.

In electoral politics, the first steps after victory go a long way in showing the sincerity, the commitment, and the ability of the winner and the winning party to follow the people’s mandate, honour their trust, and deliver on the electoral promises. So far, as the newly minted President, Anura Kumara Dissanayaka has been making all the right moves and avoiding obvious mis-steps. His decisions are good outcomes forced by the virtue of necessity, on the one hand, and constrained by his own commitments, on the other. His first steps are both laudable and promising.

With himself as President and only two MPs in parliament, the only way President Dissanayake could have convened the now dissolved parliament would have been through deals with one or two parties and their MPs in parliament. Such deals would invariably have involved cabinet positions, governor positions, diplomatic postings and keeping the current parliament on extended life support. The same old quagmire that Sri Lankan politics has been wallowing in for the last 30 years. The quagmire that Ranil Wickremesinghe would not free himself from, in any of his three incarnations this century – as peace prime minister, yahapalanaya prime minister, and economic rescue president.

President Dissanayake has made it look so easy. He dissolved parliament immediately, as he had promised to do before the election; and has scheduled parliamentary elections for November 14, and the convening of the new parliament for November 21. After two years of delays and dilly dallying by Ranil Wickremesinghe, and all the planetary explorations for years before that by the Rajapaksas, President Dissanayake has ensured that Sri Lanka will be having both a new president and a new parliament in a span of two months.

For the intervening caretaker period, he has struck a cabinet of three and neatly divided the portfolios between himself as President, Harini Amarasuriya as Prime Minister, and veteran parliamentarian Vijitha Herath. All born in and after 1968, they are a breath of fresh air for a polity that has been overburdened by old men for an overly long time. Sri Lanka not only has the smallest cabinet ever, but also for the first time a cabinet without family or extended and extensible family members – with the possible exception, perhaps, of the cabinet of SWRD Bandaranaike.

The President’s focus rightly seems to be on the economic front, as it should be, and he is showing a steady hand and readiness for consultations as he takes initiatives to navigate the country through its continuing economic crisis. Minister Vijitha Herath, whose list of portfolios includes Public Security, appears to be finally bringing some reprieve to the vexed Visa question, which Tiran Alles turned had into a global skullduggery and which Ranil Wickremesinghe handsomely ignored while lecturing everyone on how to run a country.

For her part, Prime Minister Harini Amarasuriya has reportedly issued a directive advising schools not to invite politicians to school functions. A charming piece of educational initiative that would have served the country very well had it been in place from the time CWW Kannangara introduced the free education system.

Most of all, for the first time in 47 years, Sri Lankan voters have the opportunity to have a clean slate of new parliamentarians in the November parliamentary election. The NPP will assuredly field a slate of new candidates who have never been in parliament. Hopefully, their list will include candidates with a range of educational qualifications and life experiences, and will scrupulously exclude family members and individuals with a criminal record. At the minimum, the NPP’s list should put the onus on the other parties to prune their own lists and get rid of all the deadwood and rotten mangoes that have been in out of parliament from as far back as 1970.

Based on the presidential election results, the NPP has more than a fair chance of forming a majority government. Of the 160 polling divisions in 22 districts, the NPP (AKD) won 106 and SJB (SP) 48, with six in the Jaffna District won by the Common Tamil Candidate. The NPP vote is likely to stay steady and grow, while the SJB votes will revert back to their respective political parties for the parliamentary election. This would be more so in the seven districts where Sajith Premadasa came first, five of which are in the north and east and the other two are Badulla and Nuwara Eliya. Also 28 of the 48 polling districts where Sajith Premadasa came first are in these seven districts.

The dynamic of the elections and the top of mind issues for the voters will likely be different in the parliamentary election from the presidential election. The voter turnout in the presidential election dropped by 5% nationally from 84% in 2019 to 79% in 2024, and the turnout was lower in each district as well. Whether the campaign for the parliamentary election will energize more voters to turn out in November remains to be seen. What seems to be clear is that energy and enthusiasm are now mostly with the NPP.