The truth is out there
The accusations and counter-accusations in the quarrel between S.B. Dissanayake and the President are extremely serious, and both sides are holding fire — refraining from using all the bullets at once, and firing one or two at a time.
17th Amendment aimed to stop malpractice
At an election a private person or a private institution may help whichever party it likes. A government official or a government institution has no such right: their duty is to be politically silent and inactive and let the people elect the government they want.
Who can name the winner
The PA’s defeat at the coming election is inevitable. Closing off electoral malpractice, a powerful group leaving the PA for the UNP, and the SLMC and the CWC contesting in alliance with the UNP are the main things that will produce the result.
Other side of executive presidency
The President called the 1978 constitution ridiculous and went on enjoying the privileges of the system it created, without even reforming away its contradictions. She is paying for that now.
Challenges before the constitutional council
Freeing the institutions under the Constitutional Council from politicisation, and directing them so as to guarantee good governance, is one of the council’s main obligations. The first thing it has to do is define properly what the institutions and the posts under it are responsible for.
Debilitated, but not too bad
For all the serious and inherent limits of the Seventeenth Amendment, the fact that a Constitutional Council and a system of independent commissions have been enacted is a very important step. It was the JVP’s intervention that got even this debilitated version through.
A test for JVP’s sincerity
The probationary programme agreed between the PA and the JVP will be decisive for both the PA and the UNP, and more decisive still for the JVP — because everything it does in this period will show its political maturity, its capacity to act on firm principle, and its honesty.
How independent are independent commissions?
Whatever the limits of the JVP’s programme, enacting the Constitutional Council and the four independent commissions of the Seventeenth Amendment before 24 September would be a first step towards changing the political culture of this country.
Pitfalls of probationary Govt.
Will the JVP, which is trying to supply oxygen to a weak government, get what it is asking for, the five independent commissions among it? The probationary programme has good things in it and things that could make the crisis worse.
Trapping UNP: PA’s way out of trap
The President is in a trap she cannot get out of, and is now trying to drag the leader of the opposition into it with her. Parliament reconvenes on 7 September, and if she delivers the policy statement the constitution requires, the opposition means to vote it down.