COLOMBO – Retired Sri Lankan accountant Milton Perera had hoped to use his vote in upcoming presidential elections to vent his fury at political mismanagement and an economic crisis that slashed healthcare.

Instead, his widow, Pushpalatha, will cast her ballot in the Sept 21 polls in memory of her husband, mourning a man who died of chronic asthma, unable to afford medicine.

Like many disillusioned by the chaos of direct protest, and ground down by tough day-to-day living, Pushpalatha says she will vote to show her anger at established politicians she blames for the mess.

Pushpalatha, 70, from the rundown and congested Slave Island district of the capital Colombo, said her 75-year-old husband died in December, just a few months after government welfare payments stopped.

“I had no money to buy his medicines,” Pushpalatha told AFP, while clutching a photo of her late husband, sitting in a damp home with crumbling walls.

It will be the first vote since an unprecedented economic crisis in 2022 led to months-long food and fuel shortages, with protesters in July 2022 toppling strongman president Gotabaya Rajapaksa.

‘Strong message’

President Ranil Wickremesinghe, elected by Parliament to lead the interim government, is seeking a mandate to continue tightening fiscal screws in line with a US$2.9 billion (S$3.8 billion) bailout loan from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to stabilize the economy.

While the economy of the South Asian island shows “signs of stabilization”, according to the World Bank, poverty rates rose for the fourth year in a row in 2023.

Around a quarter of its 22 million people lived below the poverty line in 2023, the international financial institution said, adding that poverty was estimated to remain above 22% until 2026.

Pushpalatha said her late husband – the same age as Wickremesinghe – had previously been provided with free life-saving inhalers through a now-scrapped government program.

“We couldn’t afford it,” she said.

Nearly four million Sri Lankans were still facing “moderate food insecurity” in 2023, a year after the crisis peaked, according to a UN Food and Agriculture Organization report.

The same report said that more than a quarter of all households had employed “crisis-level strategies” by cutting health expenses, taking children out of school or selling off farming equipment to make ends meet.

The country has also haemorrhaged talent, with many families spending savings to send at least one relative abroad.

Murtaza Jafferjee, head of Advocata, a Colombo-based independent policy think-tank, said the cost of living was the key election issue.

“There is a significant number of voters who are trying to send a strong message to the established political parties that they are very disappointed with the way this country has been governed,” Jafferjee said.

But he expects that will be expressed in protest votes, not street marches.

“Anger on the street is not manifesting… because there is a realization of many of these people that there is nothing that they can do,” he added.

Swing left

Rajapaksa is not running in the polls.

Instead, analysts say voters may shun the tough economic policies of Wickremesinghe – who has doubled taxes, cut subsidies and raised energy prices while in office.

It could also deter voters from his key rival, Sajith Premadasa, 57 – the largely ideologically aligned opposition leader – and push voters left.

This would benefit the National People’s Power (NPP) coalition, led by  Anura Kumara Dissanayake, 55, head of the Marxist party People’s Liberation Front, Jafferjee suggested.

Dissanayake came a distant third in the 2019 presidential polls, taking just 3%, but is considered far stronger this round.

While Dissanayake has been in government – he was briefly agriculture minister – his party’s relative inexperience could woo voters frustrated at veteran politicians.

Jafferjee, however, is sceptical about all the promises from the main contenders – including Dissanayake – to raise salaries while reducing taxes and following IMF requirements.

Sri Lanka has not begun repaying external loans after a sovereign default in April 2022, when the foreign debt was at US$ 46 billion.

“The reality is that we had to go through some painful medicine to repair ourselves,” Jafferjee said. “So we are on a very tight fiscal contractionary path.”

In M Pushpalatha’s Slave Island district – the historic area where the Portuguese imprisoned slaves from East Africa – there is little optimism that the polls will bring change.

“They usually come and promise a lot, but don’t deliver,” said  Pushpalatha, describing the rallies by politicians to woo voters.

“I don’t have much hope. I can’t think of anyone who will help us.”

-AFP