By Veeragathy Thanabalasingham

Sri Lanka has seen eight presidential elections since the introduction of the Executive Presidency in 1978.  But no previous election has been hyped like the presidential election 2024, months away on a distant horizon.

Incumbent President Ranil Wickremesinghe, who was elected by Parliament for the remainder of President Gotabaya, Rajapaksa’s term following his desertion and subsequent resignation in July 2022, can only remain in office until November 18 this year..

According to the Constitution, the next presidential election should be held within a period of not less than one month and not more than two months before the end of the term of office of the President.

Therefore, the next presidential election should be held between September 18 and October 18 this year. The date for the election will be determined by the Election Commission.

There has been serious suspicion that President Wickremesinghe, who postponed the local government elections indefinitely, citing the economic crisis, might try to delay the national elections as well. However, he has in recent months announced on various forums that the presidential election ‘will’ be held later this year and that it will be followed by the parliamentary elections and provincial council elections.

His announcement notwithstanding, there is widespread doubt in political circles as to which election will be held first. The president has the power to dissolve the current Parliament any time after February 20, 2024.

Many political observers have opined that Wickremesinghe may dissolve Parliament in March 2024 and go for general elections to facilitate the creation of a favourable political climate for him to face the presidential election.

However, the main opposition political parties have been gearing themselves up for the presidential election since the middle of 2023, with the Samagi Jana Balawegaya (SJB) and the National People’s Power (NPP) declaring their respective leaders, Sajith Premadasa (who is also Opposition leader) and Anura Kumara Dissanayake (who is currently heading the opinion polls), would be their presidential candidates.

Needless to say, both parties have begun their election campaigns by way of meetings in strategic areas.

Although United National Party (UNP) politicians have maintained that Wickremesinghe will contest the presidential election, he has yet to publicly declare his intention. All he has said is that he will decide on a re-run after stabilizing the battered economy. However, belying his words, the president has been making efforts to build a broad coalition to support him. It is not known how far these efforts have progressed, but some ministers from Rajapaksas’ Sri Lanka Podujana Peramuna (SLPP) have already indicated their willingness to support the president.

The SLPP which held its second national convention in December 2023, has implied it would be fielding billionaire businessman and casino owner Dhammika Perera as their presidential candidate.

Interestingly, former president Maithripala Sirisena has also announced he will contest the election.

A large number of candidates aspiring for the high seat of power are likely to contest the presidential election, which saw 35 contestants in the November 2019 election, the largest contingent of candidates to date. In contrast, the December 1988 election saw the minimum number of candidates, primarily due to the JVP’s second armed insurgency. Former president Ranasinghe Premadasa contested as the UNP candidate, while, former prime minister Sirimavo Bandaranaike and Ossie  Abeygunasekara contested as the candidate of the Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP) and the Sri Lanka Mahajana Party (SLMP).

If the 2019 election was deemed to have had the largest number of candidates in the fray, given the economic crisis-driven new political awakening and the need for a new political culture, there is every likelihood the 2024 edition would have even more candidates vying for the all-powerful post.

A recent political tradition has been to field a common candidate against an incumbent perceived as all-powerful. However, this time around, it seems there is no such need among southern political parties as President Wickremesinghe does not have much support among the people. And his UNP is in a very weak position without a proper grassroots vote base.

The likelihood of Wickremesinghe winning the hearts and minds of the people in the coming days, especially in a scenario of a steep rise in prices as a consequence of the tax hikes. It is also doubtful he will come forward to contest the election if he does not get the support of other parties.

Be that it may, in a strange turn of events however, some Tamil national political parties have started talking about fielding a common candidate in the presidential election. This is a first, as such an idea has never arisen in Tamil politics before.

Tamil candidates have contested presidential elections before. In the first election held in October 1982, Kumar Ponnambalam, leader of the All Ceylon Tamil Congress (ACTC), contested, managing to secure a meagre 173,934 votes.

Even in the Jaffna district, Ponnambalam got only about 10,000 more votes than Hector Kobbekaduwa, the SLFP candidate who contested against then-president J.R. Jayewardene. Kobbekaduwa got 10,000 more votes than Ponnambalam in the Vanni district, with the latter winning a negligible number of votes in the electoral districts of the Eastern Province.

M. K. Sivajilingam of the Tamil Eelam Liberation Organization (TELO), who entered the fray in 2019 and 2019, was the second candidate from a Tamil political party to contest the presidential election after Ponnambalam. Talking about the votes he got is a futile venture.  A maverick, he once contested the parliamentary election from the Kurunegala district for reasons best known to him.

Other Tamil candidates to contest presidential elections include Sundaram Mahendran of the Nawa Sama Samaja Party (NSSP) and Subramaniam Gunarathnam of Our National Front (ONF) in 2015 and 2019 respectively. However, though ethnically Tamils, they could not be considered as having stood for the Tamil cause as they belonged to Southern leftist parties.

It appears that some of those currently talking about a common Tamil candidate are confident the votes of Tamils, especially the North East Tamils, will play a pivotal role in electing the next president. The belief is that a common Tamil candidate would be able to use his votes as a bargaining chip to secure assurances from the main presidential candidates to resolve the Tamil question.

This belief could have held some merits when the votes of ethnic minorities determined the winner in presidential elections. However, that scenario has largely changed as was evidenced in the elections from  2005 onwards. It is also worth noting that Tamils have developed a habit of voting based on who ‘should not’ become president, and not to ‘elect’ someone as president.

An exception to this was when votes of the minority communities helped Maithripala Sirisena defeat Mahinda Rajapaksa in the 2015 election. But in the next presidential election, Gotabaya Rajapaksa won a landslide with an overwhelming majority of Sinhalese votes and went on to openly declare that it was the majority community that elected him as the leader of the country. The votes of the ethnic minorities did not have any influence in that election.

In today’s political context, however, no major candidate is likely to give any assurance to the Tamils regarding a solution of the ethnic problem, as naively expected by some Tamil politicians in the North.

In such a situation, the likelihood of a common Tamil candidate being given a platform to negotiate with the main candidates is whimsical at best. President Wickremesinghe told the Tamil parliamentarians who met him recently that the parliament elected after the next general election will deal with the issue of political settlement through a new constitution.  This was no doubt said intending to ensure the quest for a political solution to the ethnic problem does not become a major issue at the presidential election this time around.

There is a section among the Tamil polity who suggest the presidential election should be used to get a mandate from the Tamils to show the world what kind of political solution they stand for nearly 15 years after the civil war ended.

Proponents of this line of thinking should pause for a moment and ponder the fate of the mandate given to the Tamil United Liberation Front (TULF) by the Northern and Eastern Tamils in the 1977 parliamentary elections, more than a year after the famous Vaddukoddai Resolution. The ensuing tragedy that truncated the politics of those leaders who claimed the Tamil people gave them the mandate to carry out a nonviolent struggle to achieve Tamil Eelam should be a lesson for today’s Tamil politicians who are unable to launch at least a small human chain campaign successfully.

The question is, can the leaders of today’s Tamil political parties, who cannot even come together to deal with the immediate issues facing the Tamil people, be expected to arrive at a consensus on selecting a common candidate? Is there a Tamil political leader or even a civil society leader who commands wide acceptance among the Tamils in the Northern and Eastern Provinces today who can wear the mantle of the common candidate?

Leaders of Tamil political parties who do not know how to effectively move the struggle for the rights of the Tamil people to the next level in a meaningful way will be well advised to allow the Tamil people to vote the way they want without getting into the perverse political act of boosting their egos. It is unfortunate that Sri Lankan Tamil politics is increasingly becoming a joke.

– Veeragathy Thanabalasingham is a senior journalist and Consultant Editor, Express Newspapers Ltd