By Ameer Ali –

Dr. Ameer Ali

The forthcoming Local Government Elections scheduled for 6 May 2025 would no doubt be a popularity test for the four months old NPP Government even though most issues involved in that election would be specific to those localities and the candidates contesting also would be prominent personalities from those areas. LGEs are usually a contest to choose personalities rather than parties. It is therefore doubtful whether the LKD effect which played a crucial role in NPP’s historic victory at the General Elections would have the same impact at the LGE.

However, to the opposition parties which were routed in November last, LGE provides an opportunity to turn the clock back. But unlike the previous president Ranil Wickremesinghe (RW) who for fear of testing his popularity at LGEs due for March 2023 just nine months after the aragalaya cancelled those elections on account of financial unaffordability, and which cancellation was ruled by the Supreme Court as “infringement of fundamental rights guaranteed (under the constitution)”, President Anura Kumara Dissanayake has no such worries. There are more than four years yet for him and the NPP Government to deliver their election promises, although the opposition would campaign that those promises should have been delivered by now and that the failure is evidence for NPP’s incompetence to govern.

The opposition’s most effective weapon to convince the voters is in the economic front and pointedly in government’s failure to bring down the spiralling cost of living. The evidence is crystal clear in the rising prices for practically every consumer item in the market. Selective price reductions to Sathosa distributed products are ineffective, and the three-meals-a-day habit has become a luxury for hundreds of thousand families. But none of the voters or at least a vast majority among them would realise that this is a global phenomenon noticeable even in rich countries, and it is caused by factors not entirely economic in origin. In rich and resourceful Australia for example, where the next Federal Election is scheduled for just three days before Sri Lanka’s LGE rising cost-of-living is emerging to be the decisive factor in voters choice of the next government. Small economies like Sri Lanka which operate within the open economy circle cannot therefore remain immune to the non-economic virus that is causing the cost-of-living pandemic. Given this situation the most effective way to bring down the cost of living therefore is to increase local production to which AKD has made his commitment. But it cannot happen overnight.

Domestic production requires more investment from both internal and external sources, improved technology, market-based incentives and end to corruption and waste while maintaining financial stability. It was this strategy in a turbulent global economic environment that convinced AKD and his team not to be dogmatic about their ideologically determined economic remedies but to be pragmatic by choosing the least damaging ones, and it was that pragmatism which explains why the president and his economic managers decided not to disrupt the IMF agenda but to go along with it until some stability is reached. For argument’s sake, even if AKD and not RW had been chosen as president in 2023 he would have had no choice but to invite the IMF. The difference between RW-IMF and AKD-IMF combination is that the former operated with corrupt governance whereas the latter is operating with a crusade against corrupt governance. That is why even IMF has more confidence in achieving better results under AKD than under his predecessor. The 2025-26 budget passed in the parliament also reflects that pragmatism and the associated development trajectory. But none of this reality would find any place in the opposition’s campaign. NPP’s popularity depends on how convincingly the party’s foot soldiers could explain this reality to voters and in a language they understand.

But more than the issue of delayed delivery of promises the opposition’s campaign against NPP would have its usual ethnonationalist undertone. Already, certain developments in the Eastern Province in particular point towards that trend.

The most outstanding characteristic of the 2022 aragalaya was its inclusiveness. It was not a protest movement organized and carried out by a new generation of Sinhalese youth only, but one that included youth from all ethnic communities and religions. Aragalaya was not only apolitical but also a-ethnic and a-religious. That inclusiveness sent a strong message not only to the politicians in power but also to Sri Lankan voters in general that the days of communal politics were over. The success of NPP candidates in Tamil areas is testimony to the aragalaya induced political awakening. But that awakening may receive a setback at the forthcoming LGE.  

A few veterans of communal politics both inside and outside parliament continue to express their narrow communal interests at every possible opportunity.  How else should one describe for example the Muslim demand for one of their kind to be included in the new cabinet or for compensation from NPP government to Muslim families whose Corona-dead relatives were sacrilegiously cremated on the order of Gotabaya Rajapaksa, or, for that matter why are a few defeated Sinhalese politicians raising the controversial issue of Tissa Rajamaha Viharaya at Thaiyiddy in Jaffna when AKD is approaching Tamil leadership for ethnic reconciliation without destroying ethnic identity? One or two recent developments in the Eastern Province such as the controversy over a separate administrative council for Tamils in Kalmunai, information about an Islamist “Super Muslim” group operating clandestinely there, and the reunion of former Tiger commanders Pillayan and Karuna and their warning to Tamils about Muslim manoeuvres to grab Tamil lands: all point towards reigniting Tamil-Muslim tensions in order to capture local governments.

What ever the outcome of LGE may be NPP’s strength in the parliament would remain solid, but it would give a wake-up call to the government to be more alert towards regional sensitivities and be robust in delivering what it promised to the people.