Trends in the Presidential Contest
Three weeks from the 2005 presidential election, Victor Ivan sets out what each outcome would produce. Defeat ends the political life of whichever man suffers it, and fragments his party. A Wickremesinghe victory brings immediate dissolution and a parliamentary election that would cut the JVP and Hela Urumaya down, after which Ivan expects him to seek an SLFP coalition anyway to shield his peace programme from objection. A Rajapaksa victory requires no dissolution, since the Hela Urumaya could simply be added to the Alliance — though Ivan finds him harder to read, uncertain whether he would accommodate the JVP and Hela Urumaya or pursue an agenda of his own. He then turns to the arithmetic: the Alliance’s 45.60% in 2004 falls some 500,000 votes short of a presidential majority, and its 2004 total merely preserved what the SLFP and JVP had polled separately in 2001 rather than adding to it. The UNP’s losses since 2001 match the Jathika Hela Urumaya’s gains almost exactly, making those voters decisive. And the Tamil National Alliance vote, which nearly doubled in 2004, rests with the LTTE — which may back neither candidate, in which case turnout in the north and east will fall.
When must the Presidential Election be held?
Was Chandrika Kumaratunga’s second term due to end in December 2005 or December 2006? Victor Ivan works through the constitutional arithmetic. G.L. Peiris holds that the public oath of 22 December 1999 governs, making the election due in 2005; Mangala Samaraweera replies that a two-term president is entitled to twelve years, placing it in 2006 and resting on an oath the President is said to have taken in secret on 12 November 2000. Ivan tests the twelve-year claim against J.R. Jayewardene, who served two terms and got eleven: having gone to the country early in October 1982, he took his second oath in February 1983 and lost a year. Article 31(3A)(d), quoted in full, sets the term from the date of the oath. He then explains why she took the December oath at all — after the bomb attack on her campaign, her advisers invoked the doctrine of necessity so that her death would not force a fresh election, an insurance that has since become a liability. A secret oath cannot invalidate a public one, he concludes, and any attempt to make it do so will bring on another crisis.
WANTED: An organized civil movement
This article delivers a scathing critique of “crony capitalism” in Sri Lanka, a deeply entrenched system of state plunder initiated under former President J.R. Jayewardene. The author expresses profound disillusionment with the newly elected People’s Alliance government, arguing that instead of dismantling this corrupt network and recovering stolen national wealth, the new leadership has simply embraced the same wealthy elites who bankrolled their rise to power, leaving the public’s demand for justice unfulfilled.