Unity best Unity best sooner

Picture by Hirantha Gunathilaka

Thursday, May 24, 2018

It is an understatement to say that the Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP) is in crisis. It is a peculiar predicament that the party finds itself in, given that it is in power and its leader, Maithripala Sirisena is Executive President and Head of State of the country. Ironically though, President Sirisena does not appear to have the same degree of control over the political party he heads.

The SLFP has seen and survived much political turmoil in its history, most notably in the ’80s when there was a leadership squabble between Sirima Bandaranaike and Maithripala Senanayake. However, most of these disputes have arisen when it was in the opposition. Indeed, even the United National Party (UNP) went through a series of internal power struggles when it was in the opposition between 1994 and 2014. What makes the current impasse in the SLFP unusual is that it is happening when it is in government.

Last week, it was reported that President Sirisena had instructed the sixteen parliamentarians who recently left the government and sat on the opposition benches in Parliament to decide when the SLFP would quit the national unity government it has forged with the UNP.

The reason for the current state of affairs in the SLFP could be attributed at least in part to the circumstances of President Sirisena’s election to office. After being the longest serving General Secretary of the SLFP and having held that office for fourteen years, he quit the party to take on the seemingly invincible Mahinda Rajapaksa as the ‘common candidate’ of a broad coalition that was headed by the SLFP’s arch rivals, the UNP.

SLFP parliamentarians

Once in office, President Sirisena became leader of the SLFP. He then had a difficult balancing act to perform, managing his role as SLFP leader in a government which he headed but was dominated by the UNP. In doing so, he found that a significant proportion of SLFP parliamentarians still remained loyal to Rajapaksa.

That number has been steadily increasing. At the August 2015 general election, the United Peoples Freedom Alliance (UPFA) of which the major stake holder is the SLFP returned 95 MPs. Of them, 51 were loyal to Rajapaksa while 44 pledged allegiance to President Sirisena. Those 44 MPs, along with the 106 MPs from the UNP gave the government a two-thirds majority in Parliament.

The tally now stands at only about 23 MPs supporting the President with about 72 UPFA MPs supporting Rajapaksa. That is after 16 MPs including ministers, state ministers and deputy ministers left the government in the aftermath of the unsuccessful motion of no-confidence against Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe. In the process, the government lost the two-thirds majority it enjoyed.

The SLFP has been at the centre of several politically significant events in recent months. In February, it came a distant third in the local government elections, arguably the party’s worst ever showing in terms of the percentage of votes it polled. That was after a campaign personally spearheaded by President Sirisena where he criticised the Rajapaksa camp as much as he castigated the UNP.

Thereafter, President Sirisena has hinted that he may contest the next presidential elections. That came in the form of an announcement at this year’s May Day rally in Batticaloa where he said that he had no intention of retiring from politics after 2020, the year presidential elections are due. However, the President didn’t specifically state that he would be running for office again.

Then, following in the footsteps of the UNP, President Sirisena has also announced that the SLFP would be ‘restructured’ extensively and all official positions of the party would be reviewed. The restructuring is due to be finalised by early next month. This comes in the wake of demands from the ‘group of sixteen’ who defected to the opposition to replace SLFP Generally Secretary Duminda Dissanayake and UPFA General Secretary Mahinda Amaraweera, both staunch loyalists of President Sirisena.

This is where President Sirisena finds himself in a difficult situation. Both Dissanayake and Amaraweera supported the President at the cost of incurring the wrath of the Rajapaksas. Dissanayake in particular was one of those who quit the Rajapaksa government in support of the President when he resigned as Minister of Health in 2014 to contest the Presidency. Therefore, even if there is a reconciliation between the warring factions of the SLFP, the President must ensure the political futures of the likes of Dissanayake and Amaraweera.

At a meeting of the SLFP’s highest decision-making body, the Central Committee last Thursday, President Sirisena is reported to have expressed his desire to see the remaining 23 SLFPers in the unity government leaving it “sooner rather than later”. This was conveyed to the media at a briefing by former Sports Minister Dayasiri Jayasekara. Jayasekara’s comments have not been denied or disputed so far.

Sirisena and Rajapaksa factions

It appears that the SLFP now believes that remaining in government is political liability. That is because, with its currently depleted numbers in the Cabinet, it only has a few ministerial portfolios but will still be held accountable by the voting public for the actions of the UNP-led government. If anything, the outcome of the recent local government elections suggested that being in government had hurt the SLFP more than it had hurt the UNP.

The ‘group of sixteen’ is reported to have formulated a strategy for the future direction of the SLFP. Jayasekara claimed that this strategy, which included a plan for both the Sirisena and Rajapaksa factions of the SLFP to contest as one entity was accepted by the President.

However, how this reconciles with President Sirisena’s plan of ‘not retiring from politics in 2020’ and the Rajapaksas plan to promote a presidential candidate of their own- with Gotabhaya Rajapaksa the front runner at this stage- remains to be seen.

Indeed, it is accepted in SLFP circles that most of the ‘group of sixteen’ left the government with the intention of joining the Rajapaksa faction of the party or the new political party formed by them, the Sri Lanka Podujana Peramuna. Some among this group, such as S. B. Dissanayake, who previously repeatedly proclaimed President Sirisena as the next presidential candidate, are not surprisingly silent on this issue now.

A compromise reconciliation between the two warring factions of the SLFP cannot be ruled out because, with the ‘group of sixteen’ leaving the government, there has been more dialogue and discussion between the two groups. In fact, the ‘group of sixteen’ was scheduled to meet Rajapaksa yesterday for formal talks.

Proposed party reforms

However, many details will need to be worked out. Chief among them would be the political futures of President Sirisena and Mahinda Rajapaksa. Rajapaksa is constitutionally debarred from contesting the Presidency but President Sirisena is not. If he insists on running for that high office again, it could stall any agreement between the two factions before it gets off the ground.

As such, any potential consensus is only possible in a compromise where one faction of the SLFP agrees to support the other faction, which will then run for President. That is why reconciling the two camps remain such a daunting task.

The coming month- when the proposed party reforms in the SLFP will come to the fore- will be crucial in determining the party’s future political direction. For better or for worse, it will also determine whether the next presidential election will be the traditional tussle between the UNP and the SLFP or whether it will, for the first time, be a three-way contest.