Photo courtesy of Citrus County Chronicles
For the first time in history, the Sri Lankan people have elected a leftist as their president. The left, with its long history, has sought power through both armed insurrections and the electoral path. For decades, particularly after the fall of the Soviet Union, the left was not even seen as a serious actor in the political scene. In this context, how the JVP-led National Peoples Power (NPP) raised itself from a marginal party to the high point of political power within a short period would indeed be remembered as a remarkable event in the country’s political history.
Context of the elections
The outcome of the September presidential elections cannot be explained without reference to the deep economic and political crisis Sri Lanka is currently going through. The crisis it has been experiencing since 2022 is not merely economic; it is also political. A political crisis occurs when normalcy in politics is disturbed and uncertainties emerge.
Italian Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci differentiated between two types of crises. The first, which he calls conjunctural crises, are those that appear in day to day politics and do not question the fundamentals of the political order. For instance, the crisis that occurred when President Maithripala Sirisena dissolved the parliament in 2018 is an example of a conjunctural crisis. During the crisis, although there was political uncertainty, it did not amount to a crisis of a systematic nature.
On the other hand, organic crises are those that delve into the foundations of existing political regimes that can produce far reaching consequences. An organic crisis is characterized by the disconnection between dominant political actors and their mass constituencies. This leads to the alienation of the masses from their traditional representatives, creating a disjuncture between the represented and the representatives.
When looking through this lens, the political crisis associated with the 2022 economic crisis largely bears features of an organic crisis. What we are seeing is not only a short term political crisis but a deeper one that is radically challenging certain structural features of the post-independence political order. The crisis unfolded in a sequence of fast-moving scenes involving mass demonstrations, the removal of the former President Gotabaya Rajapaksa through a mass uprising, the two year rule of a president not elected by the people and the radical reconfiguration of the balance of political forces.
The consequences of these scenes appear to be far reaching. The hegemony of the two traditional parties and elitist-clientelist politics is among the structural features of the political system that have come into question. Both of these features have been integral elements of the political system and were seen as natural and legitimate by the masses.
Whither bipartisanism?
The two party system historically revolved around a center-right party, more inclined towards liberal economic policies, and a centrist party combining the market economy with moderate social welfare programs. The center-right tradition was relatively explicit about its pro-business orientation. The centrist tradition claimed that they offer a middle way between the left and right. The dominance of this system was conceived as a fact of political life. Together, the two traditional parties constituted the political establishment in the country. When one party faced electoral defeat, people moved towards the other.
The September election results indicate a decisive rupture of this system. The triumph of the anti-establishment NPP signals that the left has emerged as a serious political force in the country. Similar to their center-right and centrist rivals, the left today is not what it used to be a few decades ago. There have been many transformations and discontinuities, and the left has come a long way since the days of N.M. Perera and Rohana Wijeweera. However, the JVP-led NPP remains the political heir to the historic left-wing tradition.
What is interesting to note is the interwoven nature of the fate of the left and the center. The rise of the NPP and the fall of the SLPP are highly interrelated. Election results show that the vast majority of the votes cast for Gotabaya Rajapaksa at the 2019 presidential elections have defected en masse to President Dissanayake. This is the exact inversion of what happened in the 1950s-1960s when the rise of the SLFP caused the decline of the old left parties. Conversely, the recent advent of the NPP has reduced the popularity of the SLPP to a bare minimum as reflected in the humiliating defeat SLPP candidate Namal Rajapaksa had to endure at the elections.
Prospects for the centrists in the upcoming elections appear grim. All the senior figures of the Rajapaksa dynasty have decided to refrain from contesting and Namal Rajapaksa has sought refuge in the SLPP national list. Many SLPP politicians have joined either the SJB or the UNP representing the center-right political tradition. It is very likely that these individuals too would face a crushing defeat in the November parliamentary elections. In this context, we are seeing a shift from the traditional two party system towards a new political terrain, gradually organizing around the center-right and the left. The bipartisan system may persist but with different political actors.
Elite domination and clientelism
Next, the post-independence political order was dominated by a privileged social stratum comprising a handful of elite political families. Both UNP and SLFP have been historically controlled by these few families that maintained close fraternal ties with each other. This political elite had an intimate relationship with the economic elite of the country and commanded their allegiance. Both mainstream parties functioned as complex formations that co-opted the demands of the masses through a clientelist mechanism operated by provincial and local political elites who were ultimately loyal to the elites at the national level.
The significance of the NPP is that it is a total outsider to this traditional hierarchy. The JVP – the main constituent party of the NPP alliance – has historically been a party of the rural and semi-urban poor and intermediate classes. With the formation of the NPP, it seems that the coalition has made significant inroads into urban middle-class constituencies. The strong electoral performance of the NPP in electorates in the Colombo district indicates that they have succeeded in reaching towards lower and middle echelons of the urban middle class as well.
This political bloc, which lies outside the traditional elitist and clientelist political network, is something new to our politics. The non-elitist nature of the NPP is something that President Dissanayake had been highlighting during his election campaign. Governmental power for the first time has been shifted towards a party that does not have an organic connection to the traditional political elite in the country.
This effect is likely to be replicated at the local level in the general elections, with a wave of new faces coming from the plebian classes replacing most of the members of the local elite who have dominated politics in peripheral areas. A sweeping victory for the NPP in the upcoming general and local government elections, which now appears as a very likely scenario, would put the traditional political elite on the backfoot.
Challenges ahead
In light of the developments highlighted above, it seems that the contemporary political crisis has moved beyond the limits of a conjunctural crisis and has grown into something qualitatively deeper that questions structural aspects of the post-independence political system. In politics, organic crises are resolved either through the emergence of a new order or through forces of the old order re-establishing their lost hegemony. Where Sri Lanka would move depends on to what extent the NPP project would succeed in laying the foundations of a new political order. In this regard, the new government faces significant hurdles at both international and domestic levels.
The most serious obstacle is the confines imposed by actors of global capitalism over the country. President Dissanayake’s administration has inherited an unfair debt deal with international commercial lenders concluded during the times of the previous government. The stringent IMF program also imposes substantial obstacles to the prospect of sustainable economic growth. Although President Dissanayake has vouched to renegotiate the program, to what extent he has the leverage for bargaining remains a question.
At the domestic level, although forces of the old order seem to be in retreat for the moment, there definitely would be initiatives for re-organization. The state bureaucracy inherited from the past might pose difficulties in executing certain reforms President Dissanayake has promised. To navigate through these challenges, the NPP will have to rely on mass support and to this extent mobilizing and keeping alive the mass enthusiasm that brought President Dissanayake into power would be crucial.