Sri Lanka votes for change

Primed for unrest, the country’s elections went off without incident, and a new man-of-the-people has emerged as leader.

Gordon Weiss

28 November 20245 min read

Defying the expectations of some, the voting was orderly. Street protests years before, during which demonstrators had breached government buildings, had pundits warning of the possibility of unrest. On the day, however, a Sri Lankan public determined to have their vote speak for them held the streets. Except for the few with minor challenges, voting booths in the parliamentary elections closed on time.

Unlike the recent US elections, the polls predicted that the National People’s Party (NPP) of the politically ascendant rookie President Anura Kumara Dissanayake – himself elected in the presidential ballot just seven weeks earlier – would triumph decisively. And what a triumph! For the first time since independence in 1948, even the Tamils in their saltiest cultural heartland of the northern Jaffna Peninsula backed the NPP, linked to the once-fearsome gun and panga-toting Marxist-Leninist JVP party (the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna, or People’s Liberation Front) rooted in the sands of the Sinhalese south.

Decades of ethnically based voting and a political system run by rapacious political dynasties that gorged themselves on the fruits of office while Sri Lanka’s early promise rotted on the vine, had left a population exhausted and angry.

The victory of AKD as he is known, flowed straight from the Aragalaya (people’s struggle) street protests of 2022, which effectively overthrew the government. Decades of ethnically based voting and a political system run by rapacious political dynasties that gorged themselves on the fruits of office while Sri Lanka’s early promise rotted on the vine, had left a population exhausted and angry. With poverty, hunger, shortages of medicine and fuel, and an unceasing plague of corruption, the capital city Colombo felt as though it might finally totter and slide into the sea.

While security forces stayed their guns and truncheons in those weeks, protesters forced the resignation of then Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapaksa. His tough-guy brother Gotabaya, vanquisher of the Tamil Tiger rebel army in 2009, and later president, soon abandoned post and jetted out of the country like a Bond-baddie, leaving a froth of bad foreign debts in his wake for successors to clean up. The Rajapaksa clan had left Sri Lanka groaning under Chinese debt that – while it had funded an impressive array of roads, bridges, ports, and airports – had been skimmed for the considerable cream.

Sri Lanka’s president-elect Anura Kumara Dissanayake, arrives at the Election Commission office in Colombo on 22 September 2024 after his victory (Ishara S. Kodikara/AFP via Getty Images)

I was on Mannar Island as electoral results emerged. It’s an impoverished crooked finger of land topped by fishing huts and palmyra plantations pointing to India just 32 kilometres across the shallow Palk Strait, which once joined the island with the subcontinent. An Adani wind farm of 30 towers was erected under Rajapaksa patronage on what is a sand-spit barely a few metres above sea level. Just 85,000 people live there, fishing and harvesting palmyra palm products from old-growth forests. It is a hand-to-mouth existence, and the poorest families skip meals.

A Western Australian company is trying to mine the same sliver of sand which, to the misfortune of the Mannarites, contains valuable heavy mineral sands best turned into rocket casings and hi-tech paint. The looming wind towers have already blocked sandy fish-spawning channels that spider the spit, and which nurture some of the richest waters in Sri Lanka. Mining involves cutting down palmyra plantations, turning mineral-rich sand into sludge, and disrupting ground and surface water on what is one of the world’s critical bird flyway landing-pads. The Adani deal cut under the Rajapaksas would also see another 50 wind turbines added.

Unlike the current tide of global populism, AKD’s populism, along with his partly Australian-educated prime minister, Harini Amarasuriya, the third woman to hold that office, aims to disrupt roughshod oligarchic deals like that of Mannar, which AKD has singled out for review. Post-vote sentiment analysis points to three broad reasons the majority Sinhalese and minority Tamils voted NPP:

Fundamental transformation:

Both communities voted to spurn the traditional, corrupt politics situated in ethnic-based power bases that has throttled Sri Lanka’s progress, and to turn the tide of Sri Lankan history. Both see NPP victory as a potential moment for a genuinely collective Sri Lankan identity.

Anti-corruption and governance:

Sri Lankans voted for transparent and accountable government, with politicians to be punished for corruption, and stolen state assets recovered (one former minister was quickly ejected from a rent-free government house he’d occupied for 45 years; 800 official cars were promptly returned).

The economy:

Both major communities see the NPP victory as a chance to stop the see-sawing economic mismanagement of the country’s conga line of dynastic politicians. The government of one scion of that line, the better-regarded Ranil Wickremesinghe, who briefly filled the vacuum left by the Rajapaksas until his punishing electoral defeat, had begun that process, snagging a US$3 billion IMF bailout, reassuring Sri Lanka’s principal Chinese and Indian debtors, and returning the country to a modest growth of 2.2 per cent in 2024.

Thus, AKD’s foreign policy considerations must be dominated foremost by economic stability. Sri Lanka’s promise, on par with Singapore and South Korea at independence and stalled by misgovernment, war, and two violent JVP rebellions since, can only emerge through the trick of achieving steady growth without the wincingly high taxes and energy prices that broke the Wickremesinghe government. Rationalising subsidies and the public sector, sharpening the fiscal and investment environment, and industrial diversification will be key for the ingenue NPP government, now bearing the burden of an almost religious faith in AKD’s sackcloth man-of-the-people reputation.

Sri Lanka is another space for Indian and Chinese regional competition. The Chinese presence in Sri Lanka bears the hallmarks of its overreach elsewhere, with its opaque “debt trap diplomacy” lending practices that stoked corruption, loss of sovereign control, feckless infrastructure projects and, eventually, public resentment.

In contrast, India’s long and complex relationship with Sri Lanka is most recently characterised by its rescue package of US$4 billion during the economic crisis, giving it an ascendant edge in the competition between the two regional giants for trade, operational naval space, and partnership built on Sri Lankan interests. The AKD government will navigate a steady foreign policy course between the two as it calms Sri Lanka’s turbulence.

About the author

Gordon Weiss

Gordon Weiss is the CEO of the Planet Humana Fund, a US/Australian philanthropic humanitarian group.

Topics

China India Sri Lanka