Parliament after polls: cohabitation or conflict?
What will the new parliament look like? Will the PA improve its slender majority or find itself on the opposition benches? A seat-by-seat reading written a fortnight before the October 2000 general election.
When the going gets tough, PA gets going
The government’s greatest hope was to change the electoral system somehow, introduce a new one, and win the coming parliamentary election on it. That hope has gone, and the path left is a difficult one: lose the majority and the presidential system itself goes into crisis.
Reforms process: it’s a matter of trust
If Tamil and Muslim people saw the President’s attempt at a new constitution as a genuine effort to settle the ethnic question, its failure must pain them. And if she had succeeded, it might have brought not a solution but bloodshed between communities — because the thing missing was never the document.
Judging the independence of the Judiciary
An independent judiciary is a precondition for the survival of a democracy. Sovereign power lies with the people, and it is the courts’ responsibility not to permit laws that reduce it. The test applied here is how the bench was constituted to examine the Seventeenth Amendment.
Playing with the sovereignty of the people
The printing of the draft constitution finished on Sunday 30 July and it went to the cabinet on the 31st. Every minister approved a 209-page document none of them had read, because there had been no time to read it. On 2 August it went to the Chief Justice.
A self-created impasse
The average number of votes a candidate needed to become an MP was 35,305 in 1994 and 32,492 in 1999. From that arithmetic the column works forward to the impasse the government has built for itself, and to what the courts could and could not do about extending a parliament.
Politics of the Samurdhi
On the eve of a general election the government has cut the price of flour by three rupees, raised pensions by 300 and public service salaries by 600. More significant politically is the increase in the Samurdhi allowance — and the machine that distributes it.
What happened to the Wayamba Election?
All the Wayamba election petitions were dismissed at the stage of preliminary objections, on the ground that they had not specified how the corruption, the intimidation and the prevention of voting had affected the result. What the petitions actually contained, station by station, is set out here.
A society without a conscience
What Sri Lanka faces is a crisis of conscience. The things that separate a man from an animal are the ability to think independently and the conscience — and the organisations that exist to exercise both have gone quiet at exactly the moments they were needed.
Prabhakaran is not our only threat
An answer to the problem of Prabhakaran can be found only if the collapse running through the whole political system can be stopped and the country’s political spirit revived by a successful reform. The threat named in the headline is not the one the country talks about.