Electing A New Parliament & Ending The Old Presidency

By Rajan Philips –

A select band of 32 academics and attorneys, many of them also activists, have signed a public appeal calling upon “the Government of Sri Lanka and Parliament to immediately launch a meaningful and sincere process to abolish the executive presidency as part of a package of democratising reforms,” and for “all political parties in parliament to sponsor and vote for such a Bill and to unveil to the citizens their overall agenda with a time frame for restoring democratic government in Sri Lanka.” 

It is encouraging to see such public calls for presidential and political reforms when the prospects for them were beginning to fade away. Dr Nihal Jayawickrama in a couple of articles has reignited the question and made the constitutional and political case for returning to parliamentary democracy after a 45-year presidential detour. A detour that exacerbated all the vices of Sri Lankan politics without enhancing any of its virtues. 

There is really no valid argument – political, administrative or constitutional – for keeping the presidency in its current form. The arguments for retaining it stem from either misplaced progressive positions or misplaced fears of majoritarian nationalism. Neither school has a significant political base but can create enough noise to push back on reform initiatives.         

As for current reform prospects, some of us were too quick to give up hope after seeing President Wickremesinghe’s political somersaults. Perhaps we placed our hopes on the wrong agency, President Wickremesinghe. It did not take long to realize that he is not at all interested in being a catalyst for political change to provide the framework for economic growth. Rather, he is all about using the economic crisis to become an elected president, even for one lonely term in the late evening of his life. 

To that end, the President has been playing every political trick out of his deep pocket – canceling local government elections, testing the public mood for an early presidential election, launching conflicting initiatives for electoral reforms, and finally playing the trump card of abolishing the executive presidency. The one power that the President can now easily exercise is to dissolve parliament and have new parliamentary elections. Mr. Wickremesinghe will not do that because he cannot put together a winning coalition, and the MPs who are supporting him in parliament now are too sacred of the people to face an election. 

The President is also said to have figured out that he is not likely to get more than 50% votes on the first count, and that he is not going to be high in the second or third preferences of those who are not going to vote for him in the first place. Put another way, Ranil Wickremesinghe is not the first, second or third best presidential candidate to a majority of Sri Lankan voters. Hence the move to abolish it, as the last resort. 

Ranil Wickremesinghe has played the abolition card before – in the dying days of the yahapalana government, when he suggested abolition after the UNP decided on Sajith Premadasa as its presidential candidate for the November 2019 presidential election. It became a laughing proposition then. Even Mangala Samaraweera laughed out loud. 

This time, Anura Kumara Dissanayake has made a brilliant counter proposition that a constitutional amendment to abolish the ‘executive presidency’ should be coupled with the dissolution of parliament leading to a new general election. That scuppered the President’s manoeuvre to abolish the presidency but without dissolving parliament. At the same time, Mr. Dissanayake’s rejoinder has opened a way to move parliament to adopt the twin measures of abolishing the presidency and dissolving parliament to elect a new parliament. 

Two possibilities. No more tricks

Who will take the initiative to reform the presidency, dissolve parliament and call for a general election coupled with a referendum question? That really is the question. It would be utopian to expect the government, the parliament and/or all the political parties to suddenly launch a process for presidential and political reforms. The agency for the initiative has to be more specific and the leadership totally reliable. There are two broad possibilities here.

First, the President can still take the initiative for the twin measures of reform and dissolution. He would do so if he were guided solely by enlightened self-interest. He should publicly agree to reform the presidency and dissolve parliament at the same time. The government can introduce a reform bill to amend the constitution with a referendum proposition that will be coupled to the general election for a new parliament. Once parliament passes the reform bill with the requisite two-thirds majority, the President can dissolve parliament and the voters will get their chance to both reform the presidency and elect a new parliament. All in one fell swoop, potentially.     

To be clear, abolishing the executive presidency means only removing the elected presidency and reducing its powers to those appropriate for a head of state in a parliamentary democracy. To be clear as well, such a reform of the presidency should not require a referendum, as argued expertly by Dr. Nihal Jayawickrama in his recent articles. Even so, there will be no harm in piggybacking a referendum question on presidential reform during a parliamentary election. A clear referendum result will put an end to a political question that has confounded the country for 45 years. 

The second possibility is for the opposition parties to take the initiative. Anura Kumara Dissanayake or Sajith Premadasa could take the initiative either jointly or severally. Although Mr. Dissanayake’s parliamentary strength is technically zero, his rising popularity in the country along with that of his JVP/NPP movement, and their commitment to ‘abolishing the presidency,’ creates a moral responsibility for the JVP leader to take the initiative in parliament. It is also a political opportunity that is simply too good to miss.

On the other hand, Sajith Premadasa who is trailing the JVP leader by some distance in opinion polling, may want to take this parliamentary initiative in order to wrest control of the broader political competition for electoral victory. Either way there has to be consensus among opposition forces to support and vote for the twin measures of presidential reform and parliamentary dissolution. Getting the support of the so called ‘government’ MPs is a different matter. 

As things are, an opposition initiative is not likely to find support among government MPs without intercession by the President. However, if the President were to agree with and support the opposition initiative, then it is back to the first scenario and a potential smooth sailing for the twin measures. In this combined scenario, the remnant support that the Rajapaksas can muster in parliament will get exposed in parliament, unless they too join to stand and vote in favour of reform and dissolution. That will leave Rear Admiral Sarath Weerasekara to stand alone one more time in his habitual ignominy.

The more likely scenario is that of the President not agreeing with the opposition initiative and directing his (and Basil’s) MPs in parliament to defeat the opposition motion in parliament, or deny it the required two-thirds majority. Even so, the opposition parties would have scored a major political victory and would have created a momentum that they can carry into the upcoming elections, first presidential and then parliamentary. 

The JVP/NPP and other opposition parties can use the momentum to include presidential reform in their manifesto, and serve notice to everyone concerned including the Supreme Court that the results of the election will also serve as a referendum on reform. If the SJB or other opposition parties were to backtrack and exclude reform from their platforms, they will stand exposed and pay the political price for it.    

An opposition initiative will serve another purpose. It will bring enormous pressure on the President to stop playing any more tricks with election timing. It will force him to stay committed to the constitutional timelines for the presidential and parliamentary elections that he parroted on October 21, at the UNP Convention, at the Sugathadasa Stadium: presidential election in 2024, followed by parliamentary elections. 

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