From three percent to the throne

President Anura Kumara Dissanayake

Leaders can boast to have rescued the country if they have commenced or at least planned the economic development that can help the country to stand on its own feet after the IMF sponsored programme is terminated

It was strongly argued before the Presidential election that a party like the National People’s Power (NPP) led by Anura Kumara Dissanayake which obtained only 3.16 percent of total votes in the 2019 Presidential election cannot achieve the 50 percent target to win this time. 
It looked like a sensible argument without malice when it was taken comparatively with the performance of the Opposition Leader Sajith Premadasa’s  Samagi Jana Balawegaya (SJB) in 2019 when it got 42 percent of votes. 
Any sane person would see that Sajith Premadasa could easily pass the winning post, the mandatory 50 percent target than what AKD could. 
Nevertheless, AKD accomplished that mission and won the race which looked impossible in a normal circumstance, despite him being able to obtain only 42 percent of the total votes, since none of the other candidates too succeeded in getting 50 percent votes. Premadasa’s vote bank sank from his 42 percent tally in 2019 to 33 percent. 

Bottom line 

The bottom line that is proven here is that political developments cannot always be analysed based on statistics. Such arguments lead us to nowhere under special circumstances such as economic crises and political upheavals. The current regime change has taken place both under an economic downturn and a political mess. 
The current economic crisis that broke out in 2022 has ruined the lives of the majority of the people turning them upside down. It has shattered the life goals and dreams of the families including children of the middle class and downwards. It is something that could not be mended by just eradicating queues for fuel and cooking gas. They have been furious about the attitudes of the politicians who heartlessly used the crisis situation to further plunder the people. 
The results of the just concluded Presidential election clearly indicate that the much- talked-about 6.9 million vote bank of former President Gotabaya Rajapaksa has been eroded to the core. It was the rural and farming communities, two key groups of his supporters that first deserted him after being dealt a death blow by his ill-conceived chemical fertiliser ban. 
The people’s sufferings coupled with the widespread usage of social media, during the Aragalaya, the popular uprising against the Rajapaksa administration created somewhat an awareness about economic issues and the slogans of the Aragalaya such as eradication of corruption and “system change” seemed well-matched with the harrowing experience of the masses.
The anger against the traditional political parties that ruled the country thus far looked for a like-minded companion to wage a counterattack subsequent to the Aragalaya being brutally crushed by the Ranil Wickremesinghe administration in July 2022. It found the companion in the NPP due to the latter’s widespread visibility compared to other groups that wanted to accommodate public rage. Thus, the NPP with this new strength won the Presidential race in a manner that cannot explain it mathematically.   
Many Rajapaksa loyalists who venerated their leaders began to desert the Sri Lanka Podujana Peramuna (SLPP) since last year to join hands with the SJB and President Ranil Wickremesinghe who by then had expressed his Presidential ambitions. First, to join Wickremesinghe was those members of the Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP), in fact to remain in the Wickremesinghe’s Cabinet.   
The SLPP leaders, when their MPs started to defect, argued that it would not affect their vote bank as the people won’t abandon them despite those MPs doing so. Meanwhile the SJB and Wickremesinghe who were prepared to take any rogue into their folds were of the opinion that these defections were strengthening their electoral fortunes. 
However, the election results at the electorate level indicate that Wickremesinghe or Sajith Premadasa has gained nothing additionally by accommodating the SLPP MPs, as their vote bank had apparently been eroded long before their defection. The number of votes obtained by the SLPP candidate Namal Rajapaksa attests to
this point. 
Vote bank 
Then how can one explain the boost of Wickremesinghe’s vote bank from mere 250,000 votes at the 2020 Parliamentary election to a relative 2.3 million votes this time? One inference is that a large segment of these voters was those who believed his chest-thumping claims that he took the challenge of taking over the government while others ran away and that he salvaged the economy that had gone bankrupt. 
However, both these views were false. The NPP leader had written to President Gotabaya Rajapaksa a day prior to Ranil Wickremesinghe taking over the Premiership on May 12, 2022, expressing his willingness to take over the government if Rajapaksa is prepared to resign. He had repeated this in June in the same year as well. 
Sajith Premadasa, though after days of vacillation since Mahinda Rajapaksa resigned as Prime Minister on May 9, 2022, had informed President Gotabaya Rajapaksa his willingness to succeed the senior Rajapaksa. It must be recalled that Gotabaya replied saying “you are too late as I have already given my word to Ranil.”  
Later, AKD and Dullas Alahapperuma contested the Presidential election in Parliament on July 20. Therefore, to say that others ran away is false.
Wickremesinghe has told many a time that it was he who approached the International Monetary Fund IMF) to bailout the country from the economic crisis. This was wrong, as it was Gotabaya who sought the assistance from the global lender in March 2022, two months prior to Wickremesinghe taking over office as the PM. It also must be recalled that Wickremesinghe accused the Gotabaya Rajapaksa government in Parliament for not presenting the agreement arrived at with the IMF. 
Sri Lanka went bankrupt and saw miles-long and weeks-long queues for fuel and cooking gas due to the exhaustion of its foreign reserves. The queues vanished with the replenishment of fuel stations and gas distributing centres with the inflow of dollars, thanks to the IMF sponsored programme commenced by Gotabaya Rajapaksa. 

That is the only thing that has happened thus far, since this is only a bailout programme. 
Once the IMF comes to the rescue of a country it takes over the economy and leaders of that country cannot take any major decision. Even President Wickremesinghe had sought its consent to increase the personal income tax base recently. Hence, all credit for any achievement or failure during the IMF programme must go to the IMF. 
Leaders can boast to have rescued the country if they have commenced or at least planned the economic development that can help the country to stand on its own feet after the IMF sponsored programme is terminated. That has not happened. That is a major challenge before the new President as well.  
Apart from these misleading statements Wickremesinghe might have benefitted from his freebies to the voters such as 20 kilos of rice, land deeds under the Urumaya scheme and deeds for the dwellers of flats in Colombo. 
Although race or religion did not play a major role at the Presidential election 2024, some SJB leaders used them during the last one or two weeks apparently out of desperation. Rauff Hakeem and Rishard Bathiudeen also portrayed the NPP as an anti-Muslim party. 
SJB leaders and the supporters of President Wickremesinghe instilled fear among the voters citing the dark period in 1988/89.  They, also predicted post-election violence in case of a NPP victory. However, voters seem to have ignored these misleading claims on the 1988/89 incidents, despite the NPP leaders failing to explain to the younger generation that the JVP was the victim of those incidents where the forces loyal to the then UNP government killed over 60,000 people while running torture chambers and disposing bodies of extra-judicial killings in mass graves. 
One cannot totally rule out that these negative propaganda against the NPP had gone down the drain. At least a small segment of voters might have been prevented from voting for the NPP by these negative propaganda without which the second round of voting at the September 21 election sometimes could have been averted.  
Based on the inadequate results of the Presidential election the NPP is now faced with a challenge of fielding a dynamic set of candidates for the November 14 Parliamentary election. They would be faced with the more important challenge of keeping their promise of creating a “Thriving nation and a beautiful life” in the event they win the Parliamentary election as well, with an absolute majority.