A shift down south: Sri Lanka's presidential election breaks new ground

Sri Lanka’s presidential election, which concluded over the weekend, broke many precedents and overturned decades of political custom in the island nation. Power has usually oscillated in Sri Lanka between two main forces, led by parties of the centre-right and centre-left. Even past strongmen, like the presidents from the Rajapaksa family, began in one of those two parties. But the new president-elect in Sri Lanka, Anura Kumara Dissanayake, is instead from the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP), which represents the leftist and nationalist fringe of Sri Lankan politics.

Further, Mr Dissanayake did not win a majority of first-choice votes, as has been the case in other elections to the executive presidency. This is because the fight was a three-cornered contest between the incumbent, Ranil Wickremesinghe, Mr Dissanayake, and Sajith Premadasa. Mr Premadasa and Mr Wickremesinghe have long been rivals, but both hail from the centre-right of Sri Lankan politics, and are associated with the once-dominant United National Party. This may help explain why Mr Dissanayake was able to consolidate enough second-preference votes for a comfortable victory. Mr Premadasa and Mr Wickremesinghe are also from old political families and related to former presidents; Mr Dissanayake is an outsider, which is again quite unusual in the island’s politics.

The question is whether Mr Dissanayake will run the country the same way he positioned his campaign: As an outside insurgent. This would not necessarily be great news for Sri Lanka. The country’s economy has stabilised somewhat since the upheavals of two years ago, when it came close to default. But it has not been able to complete a proper renegotiation of its overwhelming debt burden. And the terms of the lifeline given to its economy by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) are deeply controversial domestically. It is blamed for the austerity measures, which have led, according to the World Bank, to a measurable rise in poverty. Nor are these the only concerns raised by Mr Dissanayake’s election. While he has sought to reposition himself and his party, the JVP has long been associated not just with a Maoist ideology of peasant insurrection but also with Sinhala nationalism. His campaign owed a great deal to dog-whistles to this extremist constituency, including the implication that he would protect Sri Lanka’s powerful military lobby from war-crime investigation. His party is also believed to be far more comfortable with China, which has spent the past decade courting the island, than with India. It remains to be seen how the relations progress, given what the country has faced in recent years.

New Delhi, however, has sought to reach out to Mr Dissanayake early and give him the benefit of the doubt. He visited India last year and met the national security advisor. While making it clear that the terms of the IMF loan would have to be re-examined, the new President has also indicated he does believe in export promotion and economic reform as long-term solutions to Sri Lanka’s problems. As for social cohesion, although he was the least likely of the three candidates to implement the long-promised power-sharing with the country’s Tamil minority, he has at least talked about Sri Lanka’s multicultural heritage. It is likely that parliamentary elections will be held soon to grant him a legislative majority and a Prime Minister of his choosing. It will then become clear how the island nation moves forward.