In Sri Lanka, A Landslide Win For The Centre-Left

“When the Sri Lankan electorate is in one of its not very infrequent moods of disenchantment with the regime in power,” wrote the Sri Lankan historian K. M. de Silva, “it gives vent to its displeasure with an exuberance and vehemence which all but obliterates the governing party - in terms of parliamentary seats.”

De Silva was referring to the 1977 general election, at which the United National Party (UNP), one of the island’s oldest parties, secured close to 51 percent of the vote and 140 of 168 seats, obtaining a five-sixths majority. The centre-left-nationalist Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP), by contrast, secured less than 30 percent and obtained eight seats. It was left to another party, the Tamil United Liberation Front (TULF), with 18 seats, to head the opposition for the next six years.

Sri Lanka has witnessed several landslide victories in both presidential and parliamentary polls since then - in 1994, 2010, 2019, and 2020. Yet these shifts have mostly transpired between two or three elite outfits: the UNP and SLFP until 2019, and their breakaway factions - the Samagi Jana Balavegaya (SJB) and the Sri Lanka Podujana Peraduma (SLPP) respectively - since then.

The 2024 presidential and parliamentary elections, which took place against the backdrop of the country’s first debt default, seems to have broken the stranglehold of these parties. At presidential polls last September, Anura Kumara Dissanayake, from the centre-left National People’s Power (NPP) alliance, secured 42 percent of the vote. His victory was derided as pyrrhic: though winning the presidency, he was seen as a minority president, a head of state lacking a proper mandate.

Last week’s parliamentary polls laid to rest any doubts about the president’s or his party’s popularity. The alliance not only won 61 percent and 159 seats, easily shattering previous records, but also secured wins in 21 of the island’s 22 electoral districts. With this victory, the NPP follows a long list of countries that have tilted to the left - what Ramindu Perera, a political analyst lecturing at the Open University of Sri Lanka, likens to a Latin American Pink Tide.

The NPP’s victory is all the more remarkable considering how they secured it. They obtained a two-thirds majority without building alliances with other parties - a first in a country where electoral alliances have almost become a time-honoured tradition. The NPP also won in the country’s north and east - regions populated by Tamils and Muslims, communities that have traditionally not voted for parties from outside - while securing 70-plus percent majorities in the south and west - regions previously dominated by parties like the UNP and SLFP.

Across the island’s southern province, home to many constituencies that voted for Gotabaya Rajapaksa in the last election cycle - the 2019 presidential and 2020 parliamentary - the NPP again won handsomely. Having secured 20 to 30 percent pluralities in the north and east, the NPP translated this into the single biggest win for any political party in Sri Lanka’s post-independence history. To appreciate the scale of the NPP’s victory, one need only recall that Rajapaksa’s government, riding on the wave of a successful Covid-19 campaign, secured 145 seats at parliamentary elections - 10 short of an absolute majority. In terms of seats and polling divisions, the NPP has thus surpassed expectations.

It is perhaps a sign of how outmoded political commentary has become in Colombo, the country’s capital, that right until results came in, analysts were arguing that the NPP would not secure a two-thirds and that it would not win enough seats in the northern and eastern provinces. As it turned out, the NPP trumped expectations on both fronts - winning the majority Sinhalese Buddhist vote and displacing communal parties outside the island’s southwestern quadrant. Moreover, it achieved this, as Pasan Jayasinghe and Amali Wedagedara write, “under an electoral system which moderates electoral blowouts.”

To be sure, it did not win every seat. In contrast to the north, where the hitherto dominant Ilankai Tamil Arasu Kachchi (ITAK) had to concede to not just the NPP but also a number of independent groups and candidates - who, as political analyst Sivashanthi Sivalingam argues, hold positions more hardline vis-a-vis the 30-year separatist conflict than the NPP or ITAK - certain seats in the eastern province were won by traditional communal parties, including ITAK and the Sri Lanka Muslim Congress (SLMC). In both Ampara and Trincomalee, the NPP won more than 40 percent, yet in Batticaloa, ITAK won with a 33 percent plurality.

When the NPP entered the electoral fray in 2019, it promised to displace the political establishment. So far, it has managed to do this through the ballot box: even before the parliamentary election, a number of bigwigs from the SLPP, led until 2022 by the ousted former president Gotabaya Rajapaksa, bowed out of the race. Many of those who remained and contested lost heavily - casualties of a democratic massacre, one could say. Among them were the former Power and Energy Minister and State Finance Minister, both associated heavily with an ongoing IMF agreement that has provoked much resistance among Sri Lankans.

These turnarounds led to a clean sweep of parliament - something the NPP pledged in the run-up to general elections. More than 150 of the NPP’s MPs are newcomers, while MPs who entered parliament in 1994 have opted out or been voted out. These ruptures have impacted other opposition parties as well, on both sides. The Samagi Jana Balavegaya (SJB), which won 54 seats at the 2020 general election, slid down to 40 this time. The People’s Struggle Alliance (PSA), an alliance of students and radical activists that positions itself to the left of the NPP, failed to secure any seat. The Sarvajana Balaya (SB), led by a powerful media mogul who appealed heavily to the Sinhala nationalist vote, obtained just one National List seat.

The breakdown of the old political order in Sri Lanka - celebrated by old and young voters alike - probably has to do with how the NPP capitalised on opposition to elite politics in 2022, following a spate of popular protests. As Ramindu Perera has noted, the NPP was the only party that built its campaign around the IMF agreement and issues such as the privatisation of State-Owned Enterprises (SOEs) while talking of a “75-year curse” - essentially, elite domination of national politics.

The main Opposition, the SJB, pledged a continuation of the economic policies of the previous regime while criticising its authoritarian tendencies. Yet in positioning itself in the centre, it portrayed itself as no better than the establishment - a point President Anura Kumara Dissanayake implied in his evisceration of an SJB MP who called the NPP “clueless” with regard to negotiations with the IMF.

Another reason may be the NPP’s ability to combine anti-elite discourses with popular socio-political demands. The previous administration, on the pretext of adhering to the IMF’s diktats, imposed a range of unpopular austerity measures. While think-tanks and sections of civil society praised the then president Ranil Wickremesinghe for stabilising the economy, these measures had knock-on effects on vulnerable social groups. Last year, for instance, malnutrition increased, while more than a million households had their electricity disconnected over non-payment - a result of a decision to enforce cost-reflective pricing in public utilities.

To be sure, these issues had internal and external causes. The Covid-19 pandemic and the resulting disruptions to global supply chains bore down hard on Sri Lanka’s economy. The crisis was decades in the making - a combination of low tax collection and high government spending, as economists have pointed out. At the same time, as Shiran Illanperuma has observed, the international community of finance institutions and development agencies did little to relieve pressures on countries like Sri Lanka - even as calls were made for debt relief.

For Sri Lanka, the time bomb was ticking slowly - only to explode after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which squeezed the economy as it struggled to repay international, predominantly Western bondholders. Following the protests of 2022 and the country’s declaration of a sovereign default, both Western and Indian commentators accused China of pushing Sri Lanka to the brink - though Sri Lankan economists and commentators beg to differ.

Having inherited these contradictions, the NPP government will need to find a way of managing them over the next five years. On the domestic front, it has declared it will continue with the IMF agreement, if at all with minor adjustments: after swearing in his Cabinet of Ministers last Monday, President Dissanayake held a meeting with an IMF delegation where he emphasised social protection.

On the foreign policy front, the government will need to engage with a second Trump presidency in the US. Trump has pledged greater protectionism and a potential confrontation with China. These developments may push Sri Lanka to alternative blocs like BRICS and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO).

Then there is the elephant in the room - India. Sri Lanka’s relations with its biggest neighbour have historically been rocky. The NPP alliance includes parties that have been antagonistic towards India, the most prominent being the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP). Yet the NPP has proved itself capable of moderating its stance on India, having accepted an official invitation from Delhi earlier this year. India’s High Commissioner to Sri Lanka Santosh Jha personally visited President Dissanayake after both parliamentary and presidential elections to congratulate him - along with a slew of other ambassadors and diplomats.

As Umesh Moramudali, an economist attached to the University of Colombo, has noted, these developments indicate that Dissanayake and the NPP have moved to the centre in a context where Sri Lanka has become a price-taker rather than a price-maker vis-a-vis the IMF. Given its landslide in the Tamil-populated north and Muslim-populated east, the NPP has received arguably the most popular mandate for any party in Sri Lanka’s post-independence history. It is now up to the party, and its representatives, to begin work on honouring that mandate.

Uditha Devapriya is a writer and researcher from Sri Lanka. He is the Chief International Relations Analyst at Factum, an Asia-Pacific focused think-tank based in Colombo. He can be reached at udakdev1@gmail.com.

Mohamed Shafkath is an independent researcher from Sri Lanka who is about to commence his studies at the University of Colombo. He is the project coordinator at Factum, and can be reached at shafkath@factum.lk.