Category Archives: Presidential elections

January 23, 2015 · 3:17 am

The Deep Fractures in Sri Lanka’s Polity remain — warns Dayan J

Dayan Jayatilleka in the Island, 18 January 2015 where the title is “Beyond 50/50″

The jury is in on the Presidential election. Here’s how it went down, according to an interesting source which can hardly be described as anti-Tamil, or Sinhala racist. Listen to Mr. Erik Solheim: “…The election victory was possible due to massive support from all Sri Lankan minorities. Mr. Rajapaksa won 90 out of 160 electoral districts and came out on top in nearly all Sinhala-dominated provinces. Mr. Rajapaksa roughly won the Sinhalese vote by 55 per cent. This was compensated for by Mr. Sirisena winning around 80 per cent of the Tamil vote and an even bigger share of Muslim votes. For this was payback time…” (‘Can The Unknown Angel Deliver?’ Erik Solheim, the Hindu, Jan 15th, 2015)

So Mahinda Rajapaksa indubitably won the majority of the majority of the island’s citizens: 55% of 70%. He lost. The winner failed to win a majority of the majority. He won. To a great many, this structural asymmetry makes the mandate look and feel like a doughnut.

Mr. MA Sumanthiran a liberal and a moderate Tamil nationalist, spells it out still more clearly in the Sunday Leader: “This election has shown that Maithripala Sirisena’s victory was assured by those people who are numerically in the minority and therefore the weight of their votes equal to the weight of the vote from the majority community.” Continue reading →

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January 10, 2015 · 3:20 pm

Populist Authoritarianism. Why Mahinda Rajapaksa will abdicate the Reins: A Forecast in 2012

Michael Roberts

 Reflections in January 2015

In the course of my teaching and researches I developed some interest in the phenomenon known as “populism” which informed political currents in interwar USA, Romania and parts of Eastern Europe in the 20th century. I gained considerable inspiration from the book Populism. Its Meanings and National Characteristics, edited by G. Ionescu & E. Gellner (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson). Populism had affinities with fascism, but had its roots in farming populations. Thus it was a form of “peasantism” — thereby slotting into  the university courses on peasant rebellions which I had initiated within the Department of Anthropology at Adelaide University.

This background informed my reading of political developments in Sri Lanka from the 1940s –especially the influence of the panchamahābalavēgaya 1] at the electoral revolution in 1956 and the continuing force of the ideological currents associated with the“1956 revolution” in subsequent decades (see Roberts 1994f). This necessarily meant attentiveness not only to the (Sinhala) nativism at the heart of the 1956 ideology, but also to the implications of the catch-cry duppath podhu janathāva (poverty-stricken common man). The latter, in my reading, was the equivalent of the currents of “peasantism” and “nativism” at the centre of several populist movements in other parts of the world. Continue reading →

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January 10, 2015 · 10:41 am

China and Sri Lanka: “Money Talks,” says David Brewster

Ellen Barry, in The New York Times, 9 January 2015, with title “New President in Sri Lanka Puts China’s Plans in Check”

On a Sunday four months ago, a vessel pulled unannounced into Sri Lanka’s Colombo harbor: the Chinese Navy submarine Great Wall No. 329, which is designed to carry torpedoes, a cruise missile and a 360-pound warhead. Sri Lanka’s defense minister shrugged it off as an “operational good-will visit.” But anxiety was already radiating as far as New Delhi, where the visit was seen as a clear declaration that China had arrived in India’s backyard — with the blessing of Sri Lanka’s president at the time, Mahinda Rajapaksa.

ChangZeng2-China-Sumarine-CICT-Colomo-Sep15 Pic from srilankaoneislandtwonations.tumblr.com

Whatever China’s long-term plans were for strategically important Sri Lanka, they met with a sudden obstruction on Friday morning, when Mr. Rajapaksa was voted out of office in a startling upset. David Brewster, a visiting fellow at the Strategic and Defense Studies Center at the Australian National University, said that was the price to be paid for dealing with a government that had increasingly centralized power. “You think you only need to deal with one guy,” he said, “and then if you lose that one guy, it has a serious impact on the relationship.” Continue reading →

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January 10, 2015 · 10:09 am

A Surprise! The Resilience of Sri Lanka’s Democracy

UYAN--GuardianJayadeva Uyangoda, in The Hindu, 10 January 2015  where the title reads “For a fresh beginning in Sri Lanka”

Other than among the diehard supporters of the outgoing Sri Lankan President, Mahinda Rajapaksa, there was no doubt about the victory of Maithripala Sirisena, the common Opposition candidate in the country’s Presidential election held on January 8. Yet, what surprised Mr. Rajapaksa’s supporters and opponents alike was his decision to concede defeat and leave the official residence early morning of the day after, hours before even a third of the official election results were out. A peaceful transfer of power without post-election violence, after a relatively peaceful election campaign, is testimony to the resilience of Sri Lanka’s democracy after three decades of civil war and half-a-decade of semi-authoritarianism.

sirisena oaths Continue reading →

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