Even if there is a period of fifteen months before the next presidential elections, the run up to the poll appears to have begun already with the major political parties eyeing the contest and planning their strategies from now on.
A hint of this came from President Maithripala Sirisena himself a few days ago when he declared at a public event in Nivithigala that the presidential election, due in January 2020 will not be held “even one day earlier”.
Some have suggested that the President may have learnt a lesson from his predecessor Mahinda Rajapaksa who called for an early presidential election in January 2015, with almost two years of his second term of office left, only to be defeated by a convincing margin by President Sirisena.
Of course, President Sirisena is yet to formally declare his candidacy for the election from the Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP). For that matter, none of those who have been speculated upon as potential candidates- including Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe from the United National Party (UNP) and Gotabhaya Rajapaksa from the Sri Lanka Podujana Peramuna (SLPP)- have officially declared themselves as candidates. Each of them has their own dilemmas to contend with.
For President Sirisena, offering himself as a candidate would mean that he would be reneging on a pledge that he gave in 2015 that he would not run for the office of President again. It is a promise that he had repeated on several occasions, even after being elected President.
SLPP and the Rajapaksas
However, the President could also argue that the political circumstances have changed considerably since then. At the time he made his pledge to the people, the political equation in the country comprised of two major parties, the SLFP and the UNP, jostling with each other for power.
Now however, that has changed. Mahinda Rajapaksa has returned to the political arena and the SLPP has emerged as a viable alternative, as evidenced at the local government elections earlier this year. The President could argue before the electorate that his leadership- and therefore his candidacy at the presidential election- was a sine qua non to save the SLFP from being taken over by the SLPP and the Rajapaksas.
There is also another aspect that President Sirisena is mindful of. This is the possibility running a ‘joint ticket’ with the Rajapaksa camp, where he would run for President and Rajapaksa would be Prime Minister in a government that would then be formed, either before or after a general election.
It is well known that former General Secretary of the SLFP, S. B. Dissanayake is trying his best to broker such a plan, even if some factions within the SLPP and the SLFP are not in favour of this strategy. It is also unthinkable that Dissanayake’s initiative does not have the blessings of President Sirisena.
Those who believe in the ‘joint ticket’ concept argue that it would be a ‘win-win’ situation for both President Sirisena and Rajapaksa. They contend that President Sirisena- who won the previous election with the unstinted support of the UNP- would be assured of victory if the SLPP supports him, along with the mainstream SLFP.
Barred from contesting a third time
It has been noted that President Sirisena, in his speech at Nivithigala made an interesting observation. He said that, at the next elections the public should be concerned more about who the Prime Minister would be rather than who the President would be, because the former would be more powerful. Promoters of the ‘joint ticket’ idea claim that this could be a thinly disguised invitation to the Rajapaksa camp.
They also point out that Rajapaksa’s woes in finding a suitable presidential candidate would be solved automatically with a ‘joint ticket’. At present, that has become a complex task because Rajapaksa is constitutionally barred from contesting a third time and the other prospective candidate, Gotabhaya Rajapaksa, has a plethora of allegations to answer in court in addition to being a citizen of the United States.
In this regard, Rajapaksa, perhaps in a moment of weakness, let the cat out of the bag during a recent visit to India. In an interview with a leading Indian newspaper, he was asked about potential presidential candidates. He prefaced his answer stating that the age limit for presidential candidates had been increased from 30 years to 35 years and therefore, Namal Rajapaksa could not contest.
The import of what Rajapaksa said has not been lost on others in the SLPP and even within family circles. Rajapaksa’s comments seemed to suggest that, had Namal Rajapaksa been eligible, he would have been the first choice to be the SLPP’s candidate.
Namal Rajapaksa, now 32 years of age, has been in Parliament for eight years as a backbench parliamentarian. He has never held ministerial or deputy ministerial rank. His only realistic claim to fame is being his father’s son and carrying the Rajapaksa name tag.
Critics have also noted that Namal Rajapaksa accompanied his father on the visit to India and was in attendance during meetings with Indian leaders, including Prime Minister Narendra Modi. That he is being groomed to be a successor to Mahinda Rajapaksa has now become obvious.
How Namal Rajapaksa is even being thought of as a presidential candidate has baffled the second-tier leadership of the SLPP, when there are more senior leaders who have toiled for decades in the opposition and have years of experience in the rough and tumble of politics. For instance, Dinesh Gunawardena is a glaring example.
This has raised the spectre of nepotism among the Rajapaksas once again. Worse still, now the allegation is that while Rajapaksas are given pride of place within the SLPP, Mahinda Rajapaksa’s immediate family appears to be treated as first among equals even within the Rajapaksa clan.
Meanwhile, the UNP is comparatively unperturbed about presidential candidates. There appears to be general agreement that Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe should run as its candidate. Wickremesinghe has contested twice and was unlucky on both occasions. In 1999, a bomb blast at Chandrika Kumaratunga’s last election rally handed her the sympathy vote. In 2005, an enforced boycott of the vote in the North and East ensured Mahinda Rajapaksa’s victory.
UNPers point out that, by the time elections are held in 2020, the party would not have contested presidential elections in fifteen years because it endorsed so-called “common candidates”, Sarath Fonseka in 2010 and Maithripala Sirisena in 2015. It is not an achievement a major political party should be proud of, even if it was successful in 2015.
Issues about potential presidential candidates have become even more convoluted with claims of an assassination plot against President Sirisena and Gotabhaya Rajapaksa being made by an individual.
A full-scale inquiry is underway into the allegations and the senior Police officer at the centre of the controversy, Deputy Inspector General in charge of the Terrorist Investigation Division (TID) Nalaka de Silva has been temporarily transferred pending further investigations.
It is clear that the major political parties are gearing themselves to do battle at the presidential stakes in 2020 and are grappling with internal divisions and deliberating desperately about putting their best candidate forward. If anything, recent presidential elections, both in 2010 and 2015 have thrown up unexpected candidates at the eleventh hour- and there is every possibility that history will repeat itself, come 2020.
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