A wake up call to main opposition
The opposition transacts with this government the way a serf transacts with his feudal lord. The serf’s manner before his master is timid: he could not protest even when his wife or his daughter was taken. Timid talk about four commissions will not revive a decaying democracy.
Donor reaction can compound matters
Winning the parliamentary election somehow was a condition of political survival for the PA, and above all for the President and the presidential system. National and international pressure for a clean election was greater than ever before, and the methods used were autocratic and violent anyway.
Scapegoat for political survival
While the Alliance for a Free and Fair Election was getting people to wear a yellow band, the President published an advertisement of her own in which the yellow bands are replaced by bands of various bright colours. What the two campaigns are actually asking for is not the same thing.
Human rights Vs Election victory
The future of democracy in Sri Lanka appears to hang on one question: whether the Commissioner of Elections can hold the coming parliamentary election in a free and fair manner, if not entirely then substantially.
Banding together against polls violence
Administration by representatives the people elect is an inherent feature of a democratic system. If the elections are not free and fair, the administration they produce cannot be called democratic — which is why a campaign to get a million people to band together against election violence matters.
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.
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.
Election under a commission
The ban on meetings and demonstrations has been lifted, and so has the censorship of foreign news — but publishing in the local media what the foreign media print about the war is still forbidden. The world outside has been given the right to know the truth about the war in the north.