Anyone But Ranil: A Three Step Comeback For The UNP

By Dayan Jayatilleka - October 22, 2013

Dr. Dayan Jayatilleka

“War tends to create monarchs…Any war that continues beyond a certain point is a monarchy approaching.” – Regis Debray

Most commentaries on the crisis of UNP omit the chasm-like disconnect between that party and the national electorate. That yawning gap is best evidenced by the case of Dayasiri Jayasekara. He lost his bid to be elected the National Organizer of the UNP at its Convention of 2011, and went on towin a whopping three hundred thousand preference votes at the Provincial Council election a mere two years later. What that shows is just how far out of touch the UNP is with the collective psyche and mood of the vast number of voters outside the party fold. This is similar to the fate of the Tea Party movement of the US Republicans, and the trade-unionist Trotskyite Left of the British Labour party in the Opposition during the Thatcher years (before the New Labour/Third Way makeover). Closer home, this was the situation of the UNP of Sir John Kotelawela (which resulted in the ‘event’ of ’56) and the SLFP under Madam Sirimavo Bandaranaike (which kept it in the opposition for 17 years).

Analyses of the UNP’s crisis tend to dodge the question of the leadership by diversions such as the largely rhetorical poser: “will the mere replacement of Ranil enable the party to win?” The sheer stupidity of the question resides in the unwillingness to grasp that the present need of the UNP is not so much to win elections as to stop its downward plunge—and stopping that plunge requires the replacement of the leadership of Ranil Wickremesinghe as a prerequisite.

Any possible UNP victory is but a third phase of the comeback process. The first is to stop the plunge; the haemorrhage of votes and MPs. The second is to bring the party back to its natural base vote and its status as the largest single party in the country. The third and final is an electoral triumph by achievement of a plurality of votes. Not even the first stage can be reached without visibly changing the UNP’s leader.

The SLFP couldn’t win for 17 years because of the memory of the closed economy, scarcities and queues. The UNP stayed in office because it had liberated the citizens from that curse. Today the UNP under Ranil suffers from a similar or worse malady: that of its record of appeasement of the LTTE, while the UPFA underMahinda Rajapaksa has the merit of having liberated the masses from terrorism. The SLFP had to dump the most visible symbol of that economic era, Mrs Bandaranaike, and replace her with a new candidate and leader committed to an open economy with a human face, namely Chandrika. Similarly, the UNP has to ditch Ranil and replace him with a patriot if it is to get rid of the tattoo of ‘traitor’. One may ask how this will be different from Rajapaksa rule. The answer is simple– in the same manner and to the same extent that CBK programme was different from the UNP’s Open Economy: representing a younger generation, more modern, more in tune with global trends and with a human face. The UNP needs ‘pluralist patriotism with a human face’.Read More