By Ramindu Perera
On September 23, Anura Kumara Dissanayake, the 56-year-old leftist leader of the National People Power (NPP) was sworn in as President of Sri Lanka.
The presidential election was a three-cornered contest between former President Ranil Wickremasinghe who stood for the elections as an independent candidate, opposition leader Sajith Premadasa of the Samagi Jana Balawegaya (SJB) and Dissanayake’s NPP coalition. Namal Rajapaksa, the son of former president Mahinda Rajapaksa also contested from the Sri Lanka Podujana Peramuna (SLPP) representing the legacy of the once-powerful Rajapaksa dynasty.
The results showed a dramatic shift in Sri Lankan politics — Dissanayake, who only polled around 3 percent of the national vote at the previous presidential elections in 2019 emerged as the frontrunner obtaining 42 percent of the total votes. He claimed a comfortable lead of 1.3 million votes over his closest contender Premadasa, while Wickremasinghe lagged, obtaining only 17 percent.
The SLPP which commanded a landslide of 6.9 million votes at the 2019 elections saw a humiliating defeat reduced to a mere 0.3 million votes. Dissanayake’s rise came as a surprise to many observers, as international media became flooded with reports of a “Marxist” becoming the President of Sri Lanka.
Economic crisis and political turmoil
Anura Kumara Dissanayake’s election comes amidst the worst-ever economic crisis Sri Lanka is facing in its post-independent history.
In 2022, in the context of the financial shock produced by the Covid-19 pandemic, and dwindling foreign income due to the collapse of the tourist industry and the fall of foreign remittances, the country entered a sharp balance of payment crisis. High foreign debt servicing obligations worsened the situation. The economy came to a standstill in early 2022, with electricity cuts and fuel shortages which had a crippling effect on day-to-day life.
The economic crisis triggered a mass protest movement that drew millions into the streets. The protest wave, popularly known as the “aragalaya” (Sinhala term for “struggle”) was a spontaneous uprising, which demanded the removal of the then President Gotabhaya Rajapaksa. Similar to many other South Asian countries, Sri Lanka’s politics had been largely shaped by powerful political families.
The Rajapaksa family that arose to prominence with the election of Mahinda Rajapaksa in the 2000s advanced an aggressive ethno-nationalist agenda, pitting the majority Sinhala community against the minority Tamil and Muslim counterparts. Gotabhaya Rajapaksa — the younger brother of Mahinda Rajapaksa, spearheaded the 2019 election campaign that mobilized anti-Muslim sentiments, promising to restore the “rightful place of Sinhalese”.
Gotabhaya Rajapaksa who commanded enormous popularity when he was elected was doomed by the economic crisis and was compelled by mass protests to flee the country in July 2022.
After the resignation, the Parliament, still dominated by Rajapaksa’s SLPP, elected Ranil Wickremasinghe as the new President who negotiated with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to obtain a bailout package. The IMF approved a 2.9 billion USD Extended Fund Facility to Sri Lanka in March 2023, which came with a strict conditionality regime requiring the government to impose austerity measures such as an increase in taxes and removal of electricity and fuel subsidies.
JVP: from guerilla war to Parliament
The roots of the rise of Dissanayake and the NPP lay in the shifts that occurred in the public consciousness due to the economic crisis and political turmoil that followed. The NPP was formed in 2019 as an initiative by the left-wing political party Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP). The NPP cannot be understood without understanding the historic trajectory of the JVP that encompassed various shifts and transformations.
Founded in the mid-1960s as a militant revolutionary group, and identifying itself as a “Marxist-Leninist” formation, the JVP led two armed insurrections against the government in 1971 and 1987-89. During these uprisings, the party attracted a generation of radicalized youth from Sinhala rural areas.
Both uprisings were crushed and thousands of young people were murdered during counter-insurgency operations. During the 1987-89 period, JVP lost almost all its first-generation leaders, including its founder Rohana Wijeweera.
In the mid-1990s, under the leadership of Somawansha Amarasinghe (the only politburo member of the old JVP, who survived the 1987-89 state terror), the JVP reorganized and entered into mainstream parliamentary politics.
Anura Kumara Dissanayake belongs to the second generation of the JVP leadership, which was molded during the parliamentary phase of JVP history. Dissanayake was recruited to the student wing of the JVP in the late 1980s and went underground escaping state terror. Once JVP resumed work, he emerged as a student leader, becoming the National Organizer of the JVP-affiliated Socialist Students Union. In 2000, he was elected to the Parliament and has been a Parliamentarian ever since.
After entering into mainstream politics, JVP has been involved in an uphill struggle to reach out to the broader voter population who were accustomed to voting for the two main parties that governed the country since independence.
After an initial period of trying to appeal to the voters disillusioned with the traditional two-party system, by the 2000s, JVP moved towards adopting a Sinhala nationalist position in the context of escalating ethnic conflict in the country. Advocating a military solution to the secessionist war, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Elam (LTTE) was waging in Northern Sri Lanka, JVP supported the candidacy of Mahinda Rajapaksa in the 2005 presidential elections.
Although it brought a temporary electoral boost, the experiment with coalition politics and the alliance with Sinhala nationalism ended up as a disaster for the JVP. Rajapaksa became extremely popular in Sinhala constituencies resulting in diminishing the support base of the JVP. The rural mass base of the JVP defected en masse to Rajapaksa, making the former a marginal force in the electoral landscape (see table below).
Year
1994
2000
2001
2004
2010
2015
2020
Vote percentage
1.3
6.0
9.1
(Contested in an alliance with SLFP)
5.49
4.87
3.84
Number of seats
1
10
16
41
05
06
03
Table: Performance of JVP/ NPP in general elections 1994-2020
Making of the NPP
It is under these unfavorable circumstances Anura Kumara Dissanayake was made the JVP leader in 2014. Under his leadership, the party departed from its earlier associations with the Sinhala nationalist rhetoric and adopted “anti-corruption” as a popular appeal to reach towards broader masses.
Furthermore, JVP sought to establish a broader mass movement that could attract diverse sections of society. Accordingly, the NPP was formed in 2019. The new platform brought various civil society activists, trade unions, professional organizations, and public intellectuals together — and presented itself as an alternative to the political establishment dominated by the two traditional mainstream parties.
As explained before, the 2022 economic crisis and the aragalaya protest movement provided the conditions necessary for the NPP’s growth into a larger movement. The collapse of the SLPP during the economic crisis created a great political vacuum in the country. Recent election results show that the NPP has successfully seized the political “moment” created by the crisis. This success can be attributed to the political strategy followed by the NPP which succeeded in establishing itself as a viable political alternative in the eyes of the public.
On the one hand, NPP pursued a discursive strategy that is capable of addressing the aspirations of the masses who have come to believe now that the economic collapse is linked to the corrupt behavior of the traditional power elite of the country.
Reflecting a left-wing populist strategy, Dissanayake defined a political frontier between the “corrupt political elite” that has usurped power from the masses and the “people” suffering due to those misdeeds. Calling for an “age of renaissance”, NPP was presented as a “movement of the subaltern masses”, a “people’s movement” fighting against the status quo maintained by the two mainstream parties.
In fostering this discourse, NPP positioned it as a center-left platform, distancing itself from the neo-liberal politics of President Wickremasinghe and the SJB, and also various smaller ultra-left tendencies.
While the populist appeal was at the center of the NPP discourse, several other themes featured alongside the central message. Three such themes are worth mentioning.
First, Dissanayake’s political platform was highly critical of poverty and the worsening economic conditions of the plebian masses. The NPP program vouched to provide immediate economic relief to the poorest of the poor hardly hit by the economic crisis and IMF-dictated austerity measures. Furthermore, it declared to defend education and healthcare as public services, increase investment in public services and social welfare, and strengthen collective bargaining.
Second, the NPP advanced an appeal against communalist politics. Criticizing the political elite for sowing division among ethnic and religious communities in the post-independence era, Dissanayake urged all people despite ethnic, linguistic, and religious differences to rally around the NPP to defeat the elite establishment. In many public speeches, Dissanayake attacked the Islamophobic rhetoric Rajapaksas employed to capture power in 2019.
Third, they laid greater importance on matters concerning social inclusivity. For instance, a long time ahead of the elections, the NPP launched a women’s platform, highlighting issues like the underrepresentation of women in politics, unpaid care work, and other gender-related injustices.
This platform led by women organized a series of political rallies all over the country that drew thousands of women, particularly in rural areas. These “women-only” rallies were something unprecedented in Sri Lankan political history. NPP was also the first political party to launch a separate manifesto for individuals with disabilities.
A coalition from “below”
At the organizational level, the disdain towards the political mainstream was firmly maintained by refusing to align with any mainstream political party or known politicians of those parties. Instead, NPP established a grassroots-level network known as “constituency councils” (Kottasha Sabhas) throughout the country and opened the doors of these councils to local activists who might have supported mainstream parties in the past.
Furthermore, an effort was made to organize the professional strata of the country to counter the oppositional claim that the NPP is only a protest party, incapable of becoming a party of government.
Finally, the personal image of Anura Kumara Dissanayake also played a significant role in the election campaign. As an oppositional parliamentarian for decades, Dissanayake had an impressive record of being a fierce critic of various misdeeds of both mainstream parties.
Interestingly, in the 2024 presidential elections, all three main contenders against Dissanayake were individuals belonging to political families — sons or nephews of former presidents, brought up and educated in elite schools in Colombo, and have had access to all sorts of privileges from childhood.
On the contrary, Dissanayake, a son of a working-class family coming from the rural Anuradhapura district, a product of the free education system in the country, a vocal critic of the corruption of the elite establishment in his entire lifetime, stood in stark contrast to other contestants.
The way ahead
Dissanayake’s ability to deliver on his promises depends on multiple factors, and he will be facing numerous challenges in the international and domestic realms. The foremost challenge is the debt crisis that has seriously impeded the economic potential of the country.
Debt-restructuring negotiations with bilateral and commercial creditors commenced by the previous Ranil Wickremasinghe government are yet to be concluded. Although obtaining substantial debt relief is vital for the country’s economic revival, to what extent international creditors would be flexible towards this need of Sri Lanka which has little bargaining power due to its bankrupt status remains a worrying concern.
On the other hand, Dissanayake also faces the challenge of addressing the social and humanitarian crisis the Sri Lankan people are currently experiencing. During his campaign, Dissanayake pledged to continue working with the IMF, but claimed that he would renegotiate the IMF deal to ease the economic burden arising from austerity measures.
How far the IMF would heed this call is a matter beyond the government’s control. Stringent IMF austerity measures are likely to enter into a colliding course with the promise of the NPP to grant immediate economic relief to the people and to direct the country’s economy towards a more developmentalist line aiming to strengthen the productive sector of the economy.
At the domestic level, apart from the challenges that would come from the reorganizing right-wing opposition, the NPP will have to win over constituencies that did not vote for him in the September elections. Although he performed well in Sinhala majority areas and has improved his vote base among Muslim electorates, Dissanayake could not obtain a significant number of votes in Tamil majority areas in the North.
This underperformance is due to several reasons, including the JVP’s past association with militant Sinhala nationalism, the seeming disconnection between NPP’s idea of “national unity” and political aspirations of the Tamil polity, and also the tendency among sections of the Tamil political elite to collaborate with right-wing parties in the South rather than with the left.
Delivering his first speech after being elected, Dissanayake declared that he is conscious about the quantity and the “composition” of his mandate and will do his best to reach out to sections that chose not to vote for him in the September elections. Bridging the ethnic divide in Sri Lanka is a serious task that Dissanayake will have to overcome if his promise to bring an age of renaissance is to be true.
Ramindu Lankika Perera is an academic attached to the Department of Legal Studies, the Open University of Sri Lanka. He can be reached at ramindu@[email protected].
Factum is an Asia-Pacific-focused think tank on International Relations, Tech Cooperation, and Strategic Communications accessible via www.factum.lk.
The views expressed here are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the organization’s.
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