Part 1

It is not quite a miracle. But it is certainly a very impressive turnaround. From around 1970 until 2021, Sri Lanka seemed to be on an irreversible track toward steadily worsening governance: grand corruption, disregard of the law, ethnic and religious conflict, state violence and (non-military) government incapacity and incompetence. Today, by contrast, following the September 2024 presidential and the November 2024 parliamentary elections, the prospects for more substantive democracy and better governance seem bright.

The old political elite and the broader politician class have been replaced almost completely through the most peaceful and fair elections that the country has seen for a long time. The prospect of military intervention in politics has entirely faded. The female proportion of MPs doubled from a very low 5% in a year when the global trend was in the other direction.

The new National People’s Power government, with 67% of parliamentary seats, shows every sign of intending to reduce corruption, obey the law, respect expertise, negotiate political solutions to pressing problems and generally rule in accord with the instincts of the educated, middle class professionals who provide so much of its ideological and organisational heft. The policy preferences of the government and the bulk of the population seem broadly to align.

How can we explain this turnaround? I try to summarise the more significant structural and historical causes below. But chance also played a role.

Spectacular incompetence (the stupid)

By far the most consequential of the chance factors was the spectacular economic and fiscal incompetence of the 2019-’22 government led by President Gotabaya Rajapaksa. Governments are often incompetent but rarely on this scale. The enormously damaging 2021-’22 debt and foreign exchange crisis was largely the work of the government. The key points in the sequence of events leading to crisis were:

• President Gotabaya Rajapaksa was elected in November 2019. At that point, the proportion of gross domestic product collected as tax revenue had been in steady decline since 1991 and had reached worryingly low levels. It was concerning because by that point the government had begun to accumulate significant external commercial debts in the form of International Sovereign Bonds and semi-commercial debts in the form of loans from Chinese banks as well as substantial internal rupee debts. Individual loans become due very regularly and generally need to be replaced by new borrowing. The rate of interest at which new loans are offered depends, among other things, on the lenders’ evaluations of the capacity of the borrower to repay in the future and the consequent risk of losing some or all of the loan through default. In 2019, Sri Lanka was already considered a slightly risky borrower.
• Following the November 2019 election, the government introduced a budget that radically cut taxes to the extent that projected total tax revenue for 2020 would decline by 30%. That was seriously unwise because it further reduced the estimated capacity of the government to repay loans.
• Almost immediately, in early 2020, Covid-19 struck. It had an especially damaging impact on an economy dependent on earnings from tourism. In addition, global interest rates began to increase and the US dollar, the main currency in which international loans were repayable, started to strengthen.
• The debt situation became seriously concerning but still not critical. The government had several choices. The easiest would have been to reverse the 2019 tax cuts to assure lenders that it retained the capacity to repay loans.
• Not only did the government not do that but rather it maintained that there was no serious debt repayment problem. The reasons for this denial are still not entirely clear. They appear to be a combination of hubris, the economic illiteracy of the ruling Rajapaksa family and bad economic counsel from senior advisers ideologically very hostile to anything that looked like economic orthodoxy and to the International Monetary Fund.
• By the end of 2020, the rates of interest that the government needed to pay to roll over its foreign loans began steadily to increase. And the lenders were becoming less willing to re-finance. By early 2021, experts were near unanimous in warning the government that it was heading to a debt cliff edge. Debt repayments were increasing but foreign exchange earnings were depressed. It followed that foreign exchange reserves – the means through which the country could purchase imports of fuel, food, fertiliser and everything else needed – were getting depleted.
• At that point, or even earlier, the government could have gone to its creditors, admitted that it could not continue to pay its foreign debts and invited them for negotiations on an agreed re-scheduling. It did not. Instead, in April 2021, it did something weird. Overnight, it banned all chemical fertiliser imports on the grounds that agriculture should be organic. That saved a little foreign exchange in the short term but further undermined the credibility of the government, angered farmers and reduced agricultural production.
• Finally, in September 2021, when foreign exchange reserves had reached critically low levels, the government in effect defaulted on loan repayments without ever trying to reach any kind of agreement with creditors.
• Imports were cut back radically because there was no foreign exchange to pay for them. There is no need here to detail the human cost of the ensuing months of acute scarcity of fuel and other basic commodities.
• The government could not begin to get control of the economic situation until Mahinda Rajapaksa resigned as prime minister in May 2022 and the much more competent Ranil Wickremesinghe was brought in to take his place. Mahinda Rajapaksa resigned only after the aragalaya had escalated into a mass permanent occupation of Galle Face Green on April 9 and his own thugs had openly and viciously attacked the demonstrators there and elsewhere in the country on May 9.

It was Sri Lanka’s bad luck that the regime was so extraordinarily incompetent at managing the fiscal situation. On the positive side, the suffering that resulted triggered a near-total popular rejection not only of the Rajapaksa’s but of the political elite generally. Even before the crisis, few people can have been unaware of the viciousness and corruption of those who ruled them. Yet Gotabaya Rajapaksa had won the November presidential election very comfortably against an opponent who was in every sense a more decent human being. And the Rajapaksas’ political party, the Sri Lanka Podujana Peramuna, had won 59% of the vote in the subsequent August 2020 parliamentary election.

There seems little doubt that, had the Rajapaksa government simply taken standard economic advice in dealing with the debt challenges in 2020 and 2021, the Rajapaksa family would still be major political players and we would not have a National People’s Power government today.

Luck

Three years separated the beginning of the end of the Rajapaksa regime, when the economic crisis was declared in September 2021, from the election of the National People’s Power leader Anura Kumara Dissanayake as president in September 2024. That period was politically turbulent. Although it was clear by mid-2022 that the National People’s Power was popular, it was far from obvious that it would eventually be elected to power.

Many alternatives seemed plausible. They included military intervention in support of either Gotabaya Rajapaksa or his successor Ranil Wickremesinghe leading to the suspension of elections or a successful – albeit likely very fractious – right wing electoral alliance of Ranil Wickremesinghe with the Samagi Jana Balawegaya party, capitalising on fears of the revolutionary extremism of the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna, the dominant component of the National People’s Power. Here are three of the things that could easily have gone wrong and derailed the transition to a stable National People’s Power government:

• The forcible occupation of the President’s House by Aragalaya crowds on July 9, 2022 has received enormous media attention. The occupation became something of a party. But the mood had been much darker on the evening of March 31 when thousands of very angry people had tried to storm President Rajapaksa’s private residence at Mirihana. Watching the barriers being overturned live on TV, my thought was, “My God, if they do break in they are going to kill him.” The demonstrators failed to break in and the president was not actually there. But what if things had been different, and the president had been seriously assaulted or killed? The armed forces would almost certainly have stepped in.
• President Rajapaksa eventually fled the country in July and formally resigned a few days later. That resignation made it possible for parliament to choose Ranil Wickremesinghe, already prime minister, to succeed to the presidency, exactly as the constitution stipulates. That constitutional succession in turn placed pressures on Wickremesinghe to hold the September 2024 presidential election when his term expired. What might have happened had President Rajapaksa left the country but not formally resigned? Bangladesh provides a grim illustration. When similarly overthrown by a street revolt in July 2024, Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina fled but refused to resign. The successor government is formally illegal. There is no consensus on the route back to constitutional rule. A range of groups are competing for power while law and order seems to be gradually crumbling. The military seems loath to become more directly involved, but may eventually feel forced to do so.
• During the two-plus years that he was president, Ranil Wickremesinghe assembled a very able senior economics team, negotiated a major loan and economic restructuring package with the International Monetary Fund (March 2023) and nearly completed the linked process of agreeing debt reductions/rescheduling with the government’s diverse creditor groups. Had elections been held much earlier, before these deals were wrapped up, a National People’s Power government would have found it impossible to reach any similar agreements or stick to any that had been very recently signed. From the Sri Lanka side, especially the political Left, there is considerable basic mistrust of the International Monetary Fund and similar international and “Western” institutions. It is only on the grounds that the International Monetary Fund deal is a signed national agreement of more than 18 months standing and visibly stabilising the economy that the new National People’s Power leadership feels able to resist pressures to reject or radically renegotiate it. On the other side, the International Monetary Fund (and World Bank) leadership were very comfortable dealing with Wickremesinghe but would have found it difficult to trust a novice National People’s Power government burdened with so much anti-IMF sentiment. Had there been earlier elections and an National People’s Power government in 2022 or 2023, the economy would likely still be in crisis and chaos. It currently seems to be recovering quite fast.

Chance played a significant role in the transition from the aragalaya to the election of the National People’s Power government. So too did some more long term historical forces. I discuss three of them below. Before that, to make the story more comprehensible, I summarise two broad points about the character of the previous, problematic political regimes.

The political economy of governance decline

The first point is that the original shift toward authoritarian government, back in the 1970s, was partly a response to what appeared to be major, structural obstacles to economic growth. The shift in governance was not reversed when those economic obstacles began to fade away in the next decade.

The original descent into worsening governance began in the early 1970s, in part because the economy had been badly hit in the two earlier decades by adverse factors outside government control. One was a steady unfavourable movement in the terms of trade that amounted to slow economic strangulation: the value of the tea exports on which the economy primarily depended purchased fewer and fewer essential imports (food, fuel, manufactures) year upon year. The other factor was the acceleration of population growth in the late 1940s. That put heavy pressure on land in this already densely populated agrarian society and, combined with widespread access to state-funded secondary and tertiary education, generated a major political problem in the shape of educated unemployed youth.

Both the 1970-77 United Front (leftist) and its successor 1977 UNP (rightist) government constructed (and likely believed) narratives about the need for strong government – and thus more power for the political executive – to deal effectively with deeply rooted economic stagnation and its consequences that included the 1971 Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna youth insurrection. Both the 1970 and the 1977 governments were elected with massive parliamentary majorities and were thus able quickly to introduce new, less liberal constitutions, in 1972 and 1978.

In fact, what had appeared to be deeply-rooted economic challenges soon began to evaporate. The terms of trade ceased to deteriorate after 1975. Soon thereafter, tourism, Middle East employment, aid and garment exports began to provide new sources of foreign exchange. By the 1990s, the economy began to ride the wave of rapid Asian/Indian economic growth. Sri Lanka’s average annual rate of economic growth exceeded the global average. The dynamism of the Asian regional economy, including the rapid growth of the transhipment business in which Colombo Port excels, meant that the national economy could thrive despite ineffective or unhelpful government policies. This external economic windfall gave considerable political leeway to a series of governments that were in varying degrees incompetent, corrupt and using the economy and the public finances primarily for political purposes. Those governments could claim credit for steady rises in living standards which in reality were in large part driven by external economic conditions. This political windfall was eventually squandered in 2019-’22 under an unusually incompetent president who enjoyed enormous constitutional and informal power.

The second broad point is that Sri Lankan authoritarianism involved the transfer of power from parliament and elected MPs to the political executive, ie, the executive president and the people in whom s/he chose to trust. That in turn had other perverse knock-on effects on governance.

In the 1950s and 1960s, Sri Lanka was governed through processes that had more in common with the Western European and North American parliamentary democracies than most countries in Asia. Power was relatively widely dispersed, including within the elite class that provided the leadership of almost all political parties and a large proportion of MPs. Those parties were loosely aligned on a Left-Right spectrum. Voters could – and did – to some extent vote for coherent policy programmes or positions. The new 1972 Constitution initiated the process of concentrating more power in the political executive. The 1978 Constitution amplified that in two significant ways:

First, power was increasingly concentrated in the hands of the newly-invented executive presidency and the people on whom the president chose to confer formal or informal authority. Second, most elected MPs and other politicians who were not in the inner circle were largely excluded from national level policymaking but allowed a wide range of resources and (informal) powers and privileges that gave them a great deal of authority over people in their electorates and the day to day functioning of public sector organisations. Politics and politicians invaded domains from which they had previously been largely excluded. Being a government MP, or simply supporting the government in key votes, became a route to wealth. This mode of distributing government power in turn had other consequences for governance:

• The long established political elite was able to continue to dominate politics through control of the Presidency.
• The long established main political parties began gradually to fragment as all the big political decisions were made through the presidency. Politicians began to jump between parties more frequently. In voting for an MP, voters could no longer have any confidence that they were voting for a clear political position or programme. Personal links, patronage and the emotions aroused by ethnic conflict correspondingly played a bigger role in voting choices.
• Accountability for the use of public resources was undermined. The public treasury was looted on a large scale through, for example, grand corruption at the level of big public infrastructure projects and spending leaks at every level. Conversely, tax exemptions of all kinds gradually drove the ratio of revenue to GDP down to levels similar to those of very poor and troubled countries like Ethiopia and Nigeria.

In sum, Sri Lankan politics remained fiercely competitive at the electoral level and public policy to some (declining) extent remained distributive while the political elite was able to entrench itself in power, exploit public resources with a high degree of impunity and rule in ways that undermined the capacity of the civilian component of the state apparatus to act constructively in the public interest. Capitalists generally did well. They could benefit in many ways, including low taxes, opportunities to profit from political connections, and wide scope to hide (illicit) earnings overseas. But capitalism as a system did not thrive. Public policies were at best weakly supportive of investment, innovation and market competition.

The election of a National People’s Power government based on a strong party organisation; a broad commitment to professionalism, the rule of law and anti-corruption and a (broadly) middle class cadre and electoral base represents a major departure from a kind of politics that had become normalised. I look next at three of the deeper historical roots of this change: the persistence of pluralist socio-political institutions and values; long term changes in occupational structures; and, more contingently, the smartness of the National People’s Power political and electoral strategies.

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Part II

Sri Lanka has a tradition of strong and independent civil society organisations and of professional (and organisational) autonomy within many branches of the state apparatus. By the turn of the century, it seemed increasingly obvious that this institutional basis for pluralism had been seriously eroded by politicians at every level.

As evidence and illustration one could have cited: (a) constitutional changes that created a very powerful executive presidency (b) routine attempts to bring the entire extended state apparatus, including the police and judiciary, under the direct and complete control of the political executive (c) the routine flouting of the law by the politically connected (d) the frequent murders of journalists and lawyers whose activities were embarrassing to the government (e) official encouragement for rabid anti-Tamil and anti-Muslim sentiments and actions (f) the increasing size and influence of the armed forces as the country faced growing internal armed conflict from 1971 onwards and (g) the atrocities (and extortion activities) that were committed by these forces (and the unofficial armed groups that they employed) as they defeated the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna in 1971 and 1987-’89 and the various Tamil separatist groups from the early 1980s to 2009. Especially after Gotabaya Rajapaksa was elected to the presidency in 2019 and began to appoint ex-military cronies to senior government posts and to foment violence against Muslims, there was plausible talk of plans to institutionalise some kind of (Sinhalese Buddhist) militarised regime.

The wisdom of hindsight suggests that we perhaps focused too much on the signs of deteriorating governance and not enough on the evidence of the persistence of pluralist institutions, attitudes and practices. A notable example of the latter was the successful resistance to the attempted Rajapaksa (non-military) coup in 2018. In 2015, what looked like an inevitable third presidential election win for Mahinda Rajapaksa had been thwarted by a skilfully executed plot on the part of non-Rajapaksa political elites. This split Rajapaksa’s party and narrowly elevated one of his more senior (non-family) ministers, Maithripala Sirisena, to the presidency. Sirisena then called parliamentary elections that resulted in a narrow majority for the plotters under the leadership of Ranil Wickremesinghe, who became prime minister. But Wickremesinghe showed scant respect for Sirisena and allowed him little power.

In 2018, Mahinda Rajapaksa persuaded Sirisena to dismiss Wickremesinghe and appoint him, Rajapaksa, as prime minister. Parliament was opposed and Sirisena tried to prevent it from meeting. However, a large number of demonstrators camped out permanently in front of the prime minister’s house to protest; the speaker insisted on recalling parliament despite physical threats from some of Rajapaksa’s MPs; and the Supreme Court ruled against Sirisena. The coup collapsed.

Rohan Samarajiva gives us several more recent examples of this pluralist persistence. It extended well beyond the ranks of political and civil society activists. In late April 2022, at the height of the political stand-off between the aragalaya and the regime, some rather staid establishment organisations issued carefully worded statements that in effect backed the aragalaya.

They included the Mahanayakes (heads) of the main Buddhist orders (Malwatte, Asgiriya, Ramanna and Amarapura); the Chamber of Commerce; and MAS holdings, the country’s largest employer and exporter. Within the state apparatus, the judiciary has generally retained its autonomy and the Commissioner of Elections even more so with the support of independent civil society election monitoring organisations like PAFFREL. Polling has generally been free and fair and has become increasingly free of violence that was common in the 1970s.

Part of the reason for the endurance of pluralist political institutions and attitudes is that attempts to institutionalise authoritarian governance practices and structures were to some degree performative and less consistent and coherent than they sometimes seemed. For example, since 1980, Sri Lankan and locally active international NGOs have been required to register with the government under the Voluntary Social Service Organisations (Registration and Supervision) Act No 31 of 1980. Despite understandable and continuing concerns that this legislation will be used to exercise real political control over the nonprofit sector, that has not generally been the experience to date.

Similarly, efforts to give the military a more permanent role in governance seem more amateurish in retrospect than they did at the time. Again, Gotabaya Rajapaksa is the key figure. He was an ex-military man who had been Secretary of Defence between 2005 and 2015 when his brother Mahinda was president. After the end of the Tamil separatist conflict in 2009, the armed forces had remained excessively large and had been employed for a wide range of non-military purposes.

On becoming president in 2019, Gotabaya Rajapaksa immediately appointed a number of ex-military officers to senior civilian government positions. But a military that is not institutionally coherent and disciplined cannot play a constructive role in national governance. Gotabaya Rajapaksa’s military appointees did not represent the army or the tri-forces in any collective or institutional sense. They were largely personal cronies of the president. And Gotabaya Rajapaksa himself was not a particularly unifying or respected figure within the armed forces.

While Secretary to the Ministry of Defence, he had tried to appropriate for himself most of the credit for the military defeat of the LTTE. There had been a strong rival claimant: General Sarath Fonseka, Army Commander at the end of the war in 2009. Fonseka had then become the common opposition candidate for the presidency in 2010, standing against Mahinda Rajapaksa and by extension the Rajapaksa family more generally. After his defeat in that election, Fonseka was arrested in an outrageously humiliating way on false charges. Although no longer a serving officer, he was court marshalled and imprisoned.

In 2022, it was mostly the police and Rajapaksa thugs who meted out violence against the aragalaya. The military did not step in to defend Gotabaya Rajapaksa. To allay fears that they would be called in, on April 18, the Defence Secretary assured the armed forces that they would not be used against peaceful protestors. It seems that some senior military men were inclined to intervene. But that would have been very risky. The rank and file of the army in particular were dominantly young Sinhalese Buddhist men from rural areas. While their officers enjoyed many privileges, living and working conditions for the lower ranks were often very poor. Rates of desertion were – and are – high. It is widely believed that many soldiers would have refused orders to use violence against the aragalaya.

Gotabaya Rajapaksa’s efforts to bring the military into politics were not part of a coherent, long term project and were short lived. In the meantime, the Sri Lankan military, like its peers in India and Bangladesh, had tasted the pleasures of serving in United Nations peacekeeping missions overseas (Haiti, Lebanon, South Sudan and Mali) and learned that these opportunities were not available to forces that were conspicuously engaged in political repression at home.

Changes in occupational structures

Like its predecessors, the new National People’s Power cabinet is almost entirely male and Sinhalese. But it dresses differently. Of the 25 men in the official photograph of the 2020 cabinet, 13 wore national dress – the starched plain white sarong and kurta that has been close to the standard uniform for politicians since the middle of the last century. Otherwise traditionally worn by local dignitaries like school principals or ayurvedic practitioners, national dress references indigeneity and a claim to affinity with ordinary people. It originally contrasted to two other sets of formal attire worn by male members of the national elite: the Western suit and the elaborate traditional dress of those who held feudal titles within the colonial administrative system.

Of the other 12 men in the 2020 cabinet, three wore Western suits with shirt and tie and nine compromised with a variant of white trousers and a white shirt or kurta. Compare the official photograph of the new 2024 cabinet: 13 of the 20 men wore suits with shirt and tie, six went for the compromise and only one wore national dress.

It would not be helpful to think of these sartorial differences as signifying anything about indigeneity or Westernisation. The prevalence of suits in the new cabinet reflects the extent to which the National People’s Power has appropriated the trope of professionalism – a term that implicitly references formal education and qualifications and contrasts with the implied opportunism, self-seeking, unreliability and short termism of other politicians and parties. The new cabinet is certainly educated. Of its 22 members (including the president), 18 have at least first degree; five have doctorates; and seven have worked as academics. By contrast, only one has been a full time trades union organiser.

This esteem for professionalism is not new to Sri Lanka. The large and active Organisation of Professional Associations dates back to 1972. Neither is the National People’s Power the first political party in recent years that has tried to own the term. Gotabaya Rajapaksa was elected to the presidency in 2019 while claiming not to be a politician and with the strong support of Viyathmaga, an organisation formed in 2016 that almost defines itself in terms of professions and professionalism and typically used Professionals for a Better Future as its motto. Viyathmaga had very little influence in Gotabaya Rajapaksa’s government, and quickly faded away. To some extent at least, we can understand its pre-election prominence as part of a strategy by Gotabaya Rajapaksa to gain some political leverage within the Rajapaksa family, particularly in relation to his brothers Mahinda and Basil who, in different ways, were much more accomplished politicians. Basil managed the family political party, the SLPP, whose ethos was virtually the polar opposite of professionalism. The SLPP won out over the Viyathmaga group.

Until a few years ago, Sri Lanka seemed stuck with a culture or style of electoral politics that dated back to the 1956 when SWRD Bandaranaike’s new Sri Lanka Freedom Party swept elections by adopting a pro-Sinhala and a pro-common man stance. Bandaranaike’s almost equally elite competitors quickly adopted that style. It was highly verbal and in many senses intimate and familiar. Politicians were expected to interact intensely with the people, understood principally as villagers and farmers, and on the political left, the working class. With echoes of Gandhi, the Indian National Congress and the narrative of politicians as servants of the people, they adopted national dress virtually as a uniform. The rural, agrarian Sri Lanka in which that political culture was born was always larger and more significant in the imagination than in reality.

Today, agriculture provides very few livelihoods. The typical young villager is almost as likely to be serving in the army as ploughing a field. Agriculture accounts for less than 10% of gross domestic product and the service sector for 60%. The noisy, personalised and directly interactive style of politics appeals less to people who work in offices, medical and care services, tourist hotels, IT, retail, the armed forces and food delivery in more or less urbanised environments. Government incompetence disrupts these kinds of economic activities more directly and visibly than small scale agriculture.

Professionalism in governance, however exactly it is understood, resonates widely. The National People’s Power was not the first political group to detect its electoral appeal. They were the first to fully internalise it. Among other things, they have largely avoided the sexist and vulgar language that other politicians sometimes use publicly. And that in turn helps explain why the National People’s Power is the first political party to have more than a trivial proportion of female MPs.

NPP leadership and politics (the party)

We do not know how well the National People’s Power will govern. Their successes in party building and in electioneering augur well. These are due in large part to the leadership of President Anura Kumara Dissanayake, a relative veteran of electoral politics with some brief previous ministerial experience in the 2004-’05 coalition government, who has so far exhibited more electioneering skill and statesmanship than many people expected. The president and party have made a number of good calls over specific tactical issues. In particular:

• The party generally had a good aragalaya. They were visibly present but generally avoided asserting strong leadership in response to a widespread view that this was a people’s movement and politicians were not welcome if they were to try to take control. The National People’s Power could keep a distance from the more militant and potentially violent cutting edge of the movement in part because other groups, notably the Frontline Socialist Party, were willing to place themselves there.
• The strong emphasis in the run up to the 2024 elections on the role of government corruption in triggering the 2022 economic crisis was clear, simple and electorally very powerful. It helped to keep attention off the thinness of the party’s own economic policy programme.
• It has made sense to delay as long as possible any discussion of the constitutional status of the Northern and Eastern Provinces and the broader question of devolution. These remain hot button issues. Any hint of a substantive government position risks losing more support than it gains, either from the politicians in the Northern Province to whom these issues are highly emotive and almost existential, and/or from those people in the South, including many National People’s Power members and voters, who stick to the majoritarian rejection of almost any kind of devolution. The National People’s Power did extremely well in the parliamentary elections in Jaffna district as a result of long-term grassroots political activity focused on the material concerns of poorer people. The party seems to be experimenting with what has long been the orthodox Marxist position on Tamil dissent and separatism: that it is fundamentally rooted in class, inequality and material poverty and should be tackled as such rather than through constitutional and administrative reforms. It is worth a try, although probably not a position that can be held for long.

However, the big achievement of the National People’s Power leadership goes well beyond smart political tactics. It has been the creation of the kind of a political party that Sri Lanka needs if it is to revert to being a stable democracy. It (a) has a real base membership of people who identify with and work for the party on a long term basis (b) has some degree of internal democracy and (c) is run by its cadres and the leaders they choose, rather than notables with ownership rights.

With the partial exception of the Marxist parties in the mid 20th century, especially the Lanka Sama Samaja Party, Sri Lanka has never been privileged to have such a party. Many smaller and short-lived political parties have been the creations of individual notables. Larger and more enduring parties have been created by coalitions of notables. As mentioned above, those coalitions have become less and less stable in recent years, with the result that it has become even more difficult for voters to vote with any confidence for anything that resembles a policy programme.

To some extent, what has happened to political parties in Sri Lanka mirrors what has happened in democracies globally. Active membership of political parties has declined as political engagement moves online. Why, then, is the National People’s Power different, and why might we be optimistic about it having a positive spread effect in the country? The answer to the first question seems to lie in the particular hybrid history of the National People’s Power. Its origin lies in the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna that has a long history of commitment to taking power through insurrection, conflict with and persecution by the state (the police, the armed forces and ruling parties), and building popular support for non-electoral reasons.

The National People’s Power was formed in 2019 jointly by the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna and “21 diverse groups, including political parties, youth organisations, women’s groups, trade unions, and civil society organizations”. This alliance with other groups helped allay fears stemming from the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna’s radical and sometimes violent history. It also provided a supply of accomplished and respected people from outside the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna to stand for election nationally and take ministerial portfolios. The hybridity or duality of the National People’s Power is embodied in the fact that there is not a high degree of overlap between cabinet membership and membership of the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna politburo. This is an obvious source of potential conflict and indeed it would be amazing if conflicts do not emerge. But it is also potentially a source of great strength.

One of the great vulnerabilities of political parties in electoral democracies is that, because most or all of their leaders compete in elections and take government posts, they lose their organisational coherence and sense of mission and become driven by electoral politics and the spoils of office. A political party that aims to promote substantial reform in an electoral democracy needs to retain an organisational base that is to some degree separate and focused on long-term policy issues. That is one reason why the Bharatiya Janata Party governments in India have been so relatively effective at winning elections and using power to further Hindutva goals. Beneath and intertwined with the BJP lies the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and a wide range of other Hindutva socio-political organisations. Their roles include supporting the BJP and keeping it honest, as they see it. Similarly, we can expect conflicts as the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna tries to keep the National People’s Power government honest. We should be worried if they become too intense but equally worried if they do not emerge at all.

Prior to the 2024 parliamentary elections, non-National People’s Power politicians were intensely engaged in the coalition bargaining game: negotiating about alliances, defecting from one group to another and spreading rumours about who might ally or defect from where to where. The National People’s Power was criticised for what seemed like an arrogant refusal to consider alliances or to take in any defectors. But that refusal reflected more than a calculation that the party could win alone. It was central to the credibility of an organisation that (a) presents itself a completely new political force untainted by the corruption of the old politics (b) motivates its own cadres by offering them the prospect of standing for election in return for their commitment and efforts and (c) provides voters with some assurance that they will get what they vote for at least in terms of policy stances if not policy details. That is a very different kind of party and a different kind of electoral politics than Sri Lankans have previously known. The National People’s Power will not be able to fully maintain its wholesomeness as it grapples with the challenges of governing. But if it can retain much of it and also motivate the main opposition party to move in the same direction, then it will change the way in which the country is governed quite positively.

(Mick Moore is a political economist and professorial fellow at the Institute of Development Studies at the University of Sussex. Courtesy: Groundviews, a citizens journalism website based in Sri Lanka. The site uses a range of genres and media to highlight alternative perspectives on governance, human rights, the arts and literature, peace-building and other issues.)