With the dust of the May Day rallies settling and the usual post-mortems taking place as to which political party’s rally was the biggest, this annual contest has assumed a new significance this time around, owing to the election that is to take place on Tuesday. Parties, especially the ruling National People’s Power (NPP), are pointing to the crowds and forecasting victory – a landslide at the Local Government Elections too. Tuesday’s election will be the first Local Government Poll in seven years, a period during which two Presidential and two General Elections have taken place and four different Executive Presidents have presided over the affairs of the State.
This upcoming election, though insignificant at national level as it will have little bearing on Government policy, is nevertheless significant for more reasons than one. For, it is an election that the previous President dodged on a dubious excuse, even going to the extent of disregarding a court order to conduct the poll. More importantly, it will serve as a barometer of the new Government’s approval rating seven months into the job. The regime’s desperation to maintain the support level it received at the two previous polls, lest it be seen as faltering, has been telling, with the campaigner-in-chief, the President, going to the extraordinary lengths of even threatening to withhold Central Government funding for councils not won by the NPP.
As far as the law is concerned, the local bodies do not necessarily need to depend on the Central Government for funding, as they have their own revenue streams which should be adequate for their scope of work. At the last Local Government Elections held back in 2018 during the ‘Yahapalana’ era of President Maithripala Sirisena and Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe, despite that Government having received a clear majority just three years prior in 2015, thus halting the all-conquering Rajapaksa juggernaut in its tracks, it was comprehensively routed by the newly-created Sri Lanka Podujana Peramuna (SLPP), which for all intents and purposes was merely a vehicle for the return of the Rajapaksa clan.
And less than two years after its historic win at the local polls in 2018, the Rajapaksas did indeed return in style, with the brand new SLPP contesting at a Presidential Election for the first time, recording an impressive victory. Months later, the party followed it up with even greater success at the subsequent General Elections, securing a two-third majority in Parliament. However, despite the enormity of the mandate, it took only just over two years for the very people who voted for the party to rebel against it. The rest, as they say, is history.
The point in this recollection of recent history is that there appear to be many similarities between the SLPP’s rapid ascension to high office and that of the NPP. But there is also a not-so-insignificant difference – that being, while the SLPP started at the bottom and rose to the top, the NPP is doing things the other way around by having begun at the top. Having won the presidency and Parliament, it is now seeking to consolidate its hold by securing grassroots control by winning the local councils as well. The SLPP in its maiden outing at the local polls in 2018 succeeded in sweeping the board across the island, bagging control of over two-thirds of the 341 local councils.
Whether the SLPP-governed councils did justice to the faith reposed in them by the people in 2018 should have been evaluated in 2023 as per the elections calendar, but it has since been continuously postponed on various pretexts with the President who was in office in 2023 once famously stating in Parliament that there was no need to conduct the election, and, even if there was, there was no money to spend on it.
With just days to go for what is turning out to be a historic poll, the big question now is whether the NPP can succeed in eclipsing the SLPP by gaining control of all elected Government bodies in the country. While attempting that record, the regime should however not lose sight of the other, darker side of that same story. That being, despite all the power at its disposal, the once-mighty political juggernaut eventually crumbled like a pack of cards with its once-powerful leaders being forced to go into hiding.
The root cause of the economic crisis has, over the course of the past two years, been identified as flawed policy, and therefore a crisis of its own making. That regime chose to ignore the many warnings of an impending crisis and chose to live in its own world until it was too late and the damage was done.
Today, not much appears to have changed. The warnings of an impending crisis due to a ballooning debt burden despite the moratorium on repayments continue to be heard all over again while the regime pays scant regard to them. According to Central Bank data, Sri Lanka’s debt interest component alone has shot up to an estimated Rs. 2.9 trillion in 2025 compared to Rs. 866 billion in 2020 – a near-threefold increase in just five years. Given that the total allocation for public investment in 2025 is a mere Rs. 1.3 trillion, more than half of what it pays as interest, there are serious sustainability issues that need to be urgently addressed lest history decides to repeat even sooner than 2028, when the nation is supposed to resume debt servicing.
New and potent challenges like the Trump tariffs are not going to make life any easier for the Government, already saddled with a shrinking economy. While it has been estimated that there will be an immediate impact of a minimum 25% loss in new export orders to the US as a consequence of the new tariffs, there is a palpable sense of urgency to find new markets to compensate for lost market share. However, even if new markets are found to fill the gap, much more needs to be done to grow exports and not merely ensure the status quo prevails. With hundreds of jobs in export industries in limbo, voters are likely to be more circumspect this time around than they were the last time.
Over the course of the last seven months that the NPP has been in office, there has been a growing disparity between what it preached to get elected and what it has done after getting elected. To state that there is a widening performance deficit between what was promised and what has been delivered thus far is an understatement and it is this deficit that is driving a loss of trust in the regime. Whether that loss of trust will translate into loss of votes is to be seen next week, but the possibility of such an outcome is certainly very real, notwithstanding the optics of mass support portrayed by a full house at Galle Face.
It is noteworthy that the last time a Local Government Poll was conducted, voters decided to break with tradition and not vote for the party in power. While the collective Opposition must be hoping that this new trend that began in 2018 will continue, we will have to wait and see whether it has done enough to merit such continuation. Either way, electors who head to the polls next week are likely to make a statement with their ballot.