Photo courtesy of CNN
Democracy in peril! Democratic backsliding!! Populist democracy! Political polarisation! Electoral authoritarianism!
Following Donald Trump’s victory in the 2016 American presidential elections, these and many similar ideas about “democracy under threat” have dominated public and private conversations among democrats globally. There is a real basis for these concerns. The 2024 Democracy Report from the V-Dem Institute in Sweden tells us that on average the world has moved steadily in a more autocratic direction since 2009.
But the movement is not all one way. Over that same time period, voters in some of the world’s oldest and most established democracies have clawed back power from leaders with predatory political ambitions who had abused their elected positions. The panicked image of witless voters being driven through sophisticated online manipulation by fake news, manufactured anger and artificial polarisation is to some extent real and is certainly worrying. But other voters who have become aware of the dangers of populism and online political activism are making much better voting choices.
Trump’s defeat by pragmatic Joe Biden in 2020 was the first step. Then in 2022 competent, serious Lula de Silva just managed to reclaim the presidency from Jair Bolsonaro, Brazil’s own rather incompetent Trump lookalike. In 2024, the anti-populist trend has accelerated. In June, despite poll predictions, India’s voters deprived the BJP of a parliamentary majority that it would have continued to abuse grossly. On July 4 in the UK the venerable Conservative Party, that had become mired in populism, political instability and policy incompetence, suffered its worst ever defeat. The new Labour government is serious about policy, policymaking and the long term. That government, a large Liberal Democrat contingent in parliament and two new Green MPs are the outcome of an unprecedented degree of intelligent tactical voting at the electorate level. On July 7, French voters failed to live up to the expectation that they would allow the right wing populist and racist National Rally (formerly National Front) to form a government. The new National Assembly is split between three large blocs. While that makes it difficult to form a stable government, there is a very positive dimension. After decades of rule by powerful executive presidents, power has shifted back to the Assembly.
And now Sri Lanka has joined the ranks of those old democracies in which voters have reacted to episodes of dysfunctional populist, authoritarian or unconstitutional rule by reclaiming power and rejuvenating democracy.
First and most obviously the election process itself was impressive. It was the least violent ever. The Election Commissioner exercised authority. The count was efficient and, as far as we know, 100% clean. There was no serious talk or expectation that the result would be challenged in any unconstitutional way. The losers conceded early and graciously.
Behind that, many aspects of the voting pattern are very positive. Turnout was a high 75% in total and not much below that in the Tamil speaking areas of the North and East that have in varying degrees been underrepresented in national elections for the past three decades. Their voters largely have been re-integrated into the national political party system. The common Tamil candidate, Ariyanethiran Pakkiyaselvam, won only six polling divisions all in and around Jaffna. In the vast majority of polling divisions in the North and East where Tamil speakers and/or Muslims are in the majority, the main competition was between two national, Sinhalese leaders – Sajith Premadasa and Ranil Wickremesinghe. For decades, the group of islands off Jaffna that form the Kayts polling division have been dominated politically and economically by the paramilitary EPDP. Its leader, Douglas Devananda, has always struck deals with the military and whoever was in power in Colombo. He has a history of manufacturing the right election results for Kayts at least. This time he failed. He obtained only 32% of the votes for his patron, ex-President Wickremesinghe.
The really big losers from this election are the elite families that have governed the country almost continuously since 1931, almost a century ago. There are three broad family groupings: the Senanayake-Wijewardene-Wickremesinghe-Jayewardenes (in power for 45 years), the Bandaranaikes (27 years) and the Rajapaksas (15 years). The Bandaranaikes dropped out of the game a few years ago. Ex-President Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga could not even manage the competing fragments of her once mighty Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP) and declared her neutrality in this election. Ranil Wickremesinghe, who was comprehensively beaten in this election, is anyway the last heir to the Senanayake-Wijewardene-Wickremesinghe-Jayewardene inheritance.
The most satisfying single aspect of the result was the near disappearance of the Rajapaksa voting bloc. That was regionally powerful in the deep south from the 1950s and nationally dominant nearly continuously from 2005 until 2022. The Rajapaksa’s SLPP easily won the 2019 presidential election for Gotabaya Rajapaksa. This time the heir apparent, Namal Rajapaksa, obtained 2.5% of the national vote and only 6% in Hambantota district, that not long ago was almost a family political fiefdom. Much of the rural Sinhala vote of the former SLPP (and before that the SLFP) has been gobbled up by the victorious NPP. Its leader, new President Anura Dissanayake, is the son of an agricultural labourer from the small town of Thambuttegama way out in the dry zone far from Colombo.
The Rajapaksas are not solely responsible for the extended period of de-democratisation in the country between the mid 1970s and 2022. But they oversaw the most corruption and the most vicious state terror. Gotabaya Rajapaksa, in power for less than three years from late 2019 because his brother Mahinda had used up his quota of presidential time, was the least competent head of government the country has ever endured. If Sri Lanka owes the Rajapaksas any thanks, it is because their combination of repression, corruption and incompetence generated economic crisis in early 2022 and then the popular uprising (aragalaya) that forced Gotabaya Rajapaksa to resign in July. This latest election result is very much a product of the aragalaya, especially the popular awareness of the costs of elite corruption.
The parliamentary elections will come next. My fingers are crossed for a parliament and a government that is nothing like as monotonously Sinhalese and male as the leadership of the JVP, the dominant component of the NPP. If we do end up with a parliament and a government that is more representative of the nation, Sri Lanka will may reclaim the reputation it enjoyed in the 1950s and 1960s as one of the poorer world’s most impressive democracies.