The Mahinda – Anura Equation
The President has named Mahinda Rajapaksa her party’s presidential candidate and her own brother its prime ministerial candidate, though only the first nomination was asked for — and done while an amendment making her SLFP leader for life was being introduced. Victor Ivan reads it as a chess move of some cunning: in every sequence of elections, a defeated Mahinda loses even the seat he holds while Anura Bandaranaike emerges as leader of the opposition, and family control of the party survives the defeat. Behind it sits the unresolved question of whether the presidential election falls in 2005 or 2006, and a chain of unanswerable questions about what the Elections Commissioner will decide, whether the President will seek a Supreme Court interpretation first, and what either will do if they disagree. Ivan then turns to the parties themselves, arguing neither main party is democratic — the SLFP run by one family, the UNP by several — and traces the pattern of leaders seeking to escape their term limits: Jayewardene collecting undated resignation letters from a five-sixths majority and dreaming of a third term until Premadasa stood against him, Kumaratunga collecting the same letters from twenty-three deputy ministers in 2000 with the judiciary’s support. Her dreams end, he concludes, only if Mahinda can become a Premadasa.
Two Aspects of Political Opportunism
In this article, Victor Ivan examines the mutual political opportunism and power struggle between President Chandrika Kumaratunga and Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe leading up to the dissolution of parliament. Ivan argues that Kumaratunga’s political strategy—including formalizing a permanent alliance with the JVP, taking over key ministries, and shrewdly calculating her election and oath dates—was driven entirely by her desire to avoid political invalidation at the end of her second term. Conversely, Wickremesinghe’s passive strategy was to defend the existing system and allow the President to serve out her terms so that she would naturally be invalidated, clearing his path to the executive presidency. This calculation ultimately prevented him from actively challenging her controversial appointments to the judiciary and the elections commission, allowing her to consolidate power.