AKD’s protest vote and Sajith Premadasa’s own goal

The presidential election’s outcome has been described in flowery language: A vote for system change, the rejection of the old regime, a clarion call against corruption and cronyism, a vote against the sale of national assets, and so on. 

President Anura Kumara Dissanayake

All that is true to a certain degree, but they still miss the wood for the trees. The risk of these feel-good assessments is that they could also delude the election winner. To explore the danger of misreading an election mandate, look no further than the Yahapalanaya’s and Maithripala Sirisena’s victory over the Mahinda Rajapaksa regime. Sirisena won the election, thanks to sound electoral arithmetic, riding on the overwhelming minority vote, even though he lost the South by half a million votes. However, his backers misread the election results as a vote against Rajapaksa’s infrastructure development projects and suspended almost all major loan-funded projects to appear to be delivering on their mandate. That was the beginning of the end for the Yahapalanaya and also the end of a decade of sustained economic growth. 

The commentators call it a vote for change or a system change. Every time voters change a government, they surely vote for a change. When the Sri Lankans elected Mahinda Rajapaksa in 2005, they voted for a change (from Chandrika Kumaratunga’s more elitist rule); when they voted for Sirisena, they voted for a change. When they voted for Gotabaya Rajapaksa, they voted for a change. So is now when they have voted for the presidency of Anura Kumara Dissanayake. 

But that does not tell the whole story. There are a few reasons as to why.

First, the distribution of votes across the three main candidates would reveal the perceived change has been endorsed by only 43% of the Sri Lankan voters, whereas 57% voted for the other candidates, including an overwhelming over 50% to the UNP and SJB candidates.

Protest vote

Second, leave aside the majority who did not vote for the AKD’s presidency, but what is the primary driver that guided the voter who voted for him?

 A cursory glance at the 2019 presidential election would tell what guided the vote for Gotabaya Rajapaksa: Islamobohia,  Sinhala Buddhist supremacy in its heightened paranoia, dynastic allure and conspiracy theories that exploited the worst of humankind. 

A similar look at this election would reveal what guided the vote:  anger and despair. The vote for Anura Kumara Dissanayake, more than anything else, was a protest vote. People aired their anger through their vote to the AKD. All other much-hyped electoral promises, though influential in glueing some of these voters, were not the primary catalyst, which, I repeat, is the anger. 

To know the intent of the protest vote, one should look into who exactly these voters were overwhelmingly. By and large, they are rural and urban Sinhalese poor and lower middle class-  the same demography that elected Gotabaya Rajapaksa in the previous election. They then took the brunt of the economic crisis. They were angry at their predicament and those responsible for it. Their anger is the catalyst of the vote and AKD’s election victory. More than any other party, the JVP and NPP exploited and capitalised on the popular public anger at the economic crisis, just like Gotabaya Rajapaksa did with the public anger and anxiety over the Easter Sunday attacks.  
Anura Kumara Dissanayake managed to obtain approximately 4.5 million of previous Gotabaya Rajapaksa voters. It does not look like their vote was guided by a dawn of moral conviction, effecting an overnight shift from dynastism to good governance. Rather, AKD gave them an avenue to vent their anger by voting for the NPP. 
The NPP and JVP should now be very cautious that the Rajapaksas’ with a fresh round of racist conspiracy theories, could win back this electorate at the opportune time. 

Rejection of the old guard?

Some have conveniently described the election outcome as a rejection of the traditional establishment or the old guard. But there is a hitch. The traditional establishment – UNP’s Ranil Wickremesinghe and SJB’s Sajith Premadasa combined, polled 1 million more votes than Anura Kumara Dissanayake. Collectively, they obtained just 300,000 votes short of Gotabaya Rajapaksa’s mammoth electoral tally in 2019.

I would love to see the rejection of the old guard in their rent-seeking ugliness. But the numbers disprove that eventuality- though it is fair to say a sizeable swath of the voters, though not the majority, had rejected the traditional status quo of politics for the first time. 

Similarly, it is inspiring to say that the voters cast their vote against corruption, cronyism, and the sale of state assets. 

But, an overwhelming 57 per cent of voters did not buy in that line of election promises. That may explain their different priorities and assessments, though the vast majority, including those who didn’t vote, would support a campaign against corruption. 

The government could have one obvious advantage by coming to terms with the nature of its mandate. That would give it a greater leeway in governing the country and preclude it from some of the most abhorrent forms of economic populism, including some mentioned in its election manifesto. Gotabaya Rajapaksa succumbed to that temptation. He justified his tax reliefs on his campaign promises and set off the country’s economic free fall. 

Premadasa’s own goal

Third, the protest vote itself did not make Anura Kumara Dissanayake the winner. Sajith Premadasa did. In his hurry to become President, he undercut not only Ranil Wickremesinghe but also a total of 6.6 million voters who voted for him and Ranil Wickremesinghe. That is 1 million more votes than the tally of Anura Kumara Dissanayake.
Anura Kumara Dissanayake didn’t win.  Sajith Premadasa handed over the election to him that a united UNP-SJB candidate could have won on a platter.

Why find fault with Premadasa? Why not Wickremesinghe? Because after stabilising the economy that was in free fall, Ranil Wickremesinghe has a greater and justifiable claim to be the candidate for the presidency than Sajith Premasada.  

A little gratitude and commonsense could have averted the mutually assured destruction of Premasada and Wickremesinghe and could also have made  Premadasa the prime minister. But he put his oversised ego before the country. 

 The rest of the party leaders of the SJB were not oblivious to what was in the making, but they could not inject a degree of common sense into their leadership. That might explain a far deeper and far darker rot in the party than one meets the eye.   Personal vindictiveness and petty score setting are currently obstructing talks for a common opposition alliance – Premadasa’s acolytes want Wickremesinghe to give up the leadership of the UNP as a precondition. That again reveals a party and its leadership devoid of reality. That should also make voters, including most of us, who hold strong reservations about the NPP, wonder about the worthiness of the SJB under its current form as an alternative to the NPP juggernaut at the general election.  

A common sense approach would be to build an alliance, defend the majority vote polled in the presidential election, and potentially form a government. But again, Premadasa has put his ego before the party and, perhaps, the country.

The SJB and the UNP lost momentum when they lost the presidential election, which generally set the trajectory of the outcome of the general election. But, there is much that can still be salvaged. But, it is becoming increasingly likely that the same blunders will be repeated, and it would, yet again, decide the general election against the SJB.