For those who wonder why there are no more landslides in most elections and why even when there are some, the huge mandates begin to carry no weight in no time, there is news. There is news, if they were under a rock, that is.
J. R. Jayewardene ruled in the 80s with a five-sixths majority and was so landslide-happy that he was audacious. Before gender reassignment became popular at least in certain parts of the world, he said he would reassign gender, except it was the only thing he couldn’t do. (I’m able to do anything except make a man a woman and vice versa.”)
If he was making that comment today he would have probably hastened to add he can do that too.
JR’s was a thundering majority, to use the apt description in the locally popular English idiom. People who had been schooled in the potency of a two-thirds majority — Mrs. Bandaranaike had one — couldn’t quite wrap their heads around the idea of a five-sixth juggernaut.
But J.R Jayewardene insisted on calling it five-sixths as opposed to two-thirds. In 1984, his friend in the White House, to whom he gifted a Sri Lankan elephant, Ronald Reagan, obtained probably the only majority that could rival his.
In his run for a second term, Reagan won 49 out of 50 states. He trounced the Democratic candidate Walter Mondale who only won his home state of Minnesota, by a whisker, and the District of Columbia.
INCUMBENT
But Richard Nixon, who had previously lost a presidential election to John. F. Kennedy, won in a bigger landslide than even Reagan in 84. However, he couldn’t end his second term due to the scandalous break-in to the Democratic Party headquarters in the run up to the presidential election, and the subsequent attempts to cover up the crime.
Today, in the US, there are Red States and Blue States so called, with most of the coastal states voting Blue (Democrat) and the majority of the landlocked states in the interior voting Red. (Republican.)
The polarisation of the electorate in the US is marked today. A Reagan style victory, carrying all but one of the states, is unthinkable under the circumstances for either candidate, though in 2024 Donald Trump says that the Republicans would be a freight train that’s unstoppable.
Nobody believes he could win in a landslide of the proportions of the past, even if he wins, which at this point in time is by no means a certainty, though the incumbent has low approval ratings.
Electoral politics are heavily polarised in most parts of the world. In the US the polarisations are marked in contrast to Reagan’s time, and all this began with divisive issues — such as abortion and so on — and populist alternatives to traditional politics.
In countries such as Germany and the UK the polarisations are so marked that the system at times appears to be dysfunctional, almost.
There are landslides still in the UK simply because the electoral system is first past the post, unlike in the US which has its own unique system of the Electoral College as far as presidential elections are concerned.
Despite the vast polarisations that mark today’s electoral contests in Sri Lanka and the UK, both Gotabaya Rajapaksa and Boris Johnson managed to secure landslide victories in the 2019 elections in their countries. But these landslides unraveled so quickly and both leaders were forced out of office, though in different ways.
That too was due to the vastly polarised nature of the politics of the day. His own missteps may have caused Gotabaya’s downfall but it couldn’t have happened in a vacuum.
His politics was tremendously polarising, and it added to the polarisation that was already evident in the political landscape.
In the case of Boris Johnson, it could be said that his success was due to the polarisations that he caused, with issues such as Brexit, which was a direct result of the out on limb campaign he and his ilk carried out.
In the increasingly polarised political arena now common in almost all parts of the world, calm and uneventful governance is a thing of the past.
Stability, and stable or what used to be termed strong majorities are also essentially a thing of the past. The far-right is not exactly a perfect foil to the far-left, and neither is ultra-nationalist a perfect foil to the out on limb globalist. Extreme polarisation is commonplace.
Governance within the parametres of such polarisations is almost perpetually dysfunctional. If it’s not perpetually dysfunctional, certainly things lean towards dysfunctional for the most part, as it appeared to be the case in the UK after Brexit, and in Sri Lanka during the economic meltdown.
Politics becomes so polarised that across the divide, ordinary people fall out with each other at family functions talking politics, but this is the least of the problems of people who undergo stress resultant from political dysfunction in highly polarised societies, that gives way to highly polarising political dramas.
Polarisations
In this country the polarisations are mostly defined around issues such as patriotism and political autonomy. It can be argued that there have not been hung parliaments in the very recent past.
But hung or not, parliamentary politics has been volatile and often the polarisations have spilled over to the streets.
Is anyone interested in defusing these situations? The polarisations in the US have been getting stronger, and the politics of accommodation has become so much a thing of the past.
But people seem to yearn for a simpler politics that they were used to from a simpler time. Sometimes they have no choice but to elect a Government from the far-right or the far-left. It’s simply because there is nothing in-between.
That may already be the reality in several Western democracies. There are no politics of the middle-ground because the polarisations have ensured that moderate politicians too eventually embrace the extreme choices offered by the political polarity.
The votes cast in this type of political system are often votes cast out of desperation to seek a way out. People seek a way out by embracing new political arrangements that are seldom any good.
In Brazil an obnoxious demagogue, Jair Bolsarano, was elected President with extremely damaging consequences for the country, such as the fast depletion of the Amazon rain forest.
Politics under these circumstances seems to be in a perpetual flux of sorts. It means there is so much uncertainty, and that’s not necessarily a good outcome, though in certain ways it can be seen that people at least superficially have more of a choice.
There is a certain lack of clarity animating our domestic political circumstances in the current conjuncture too. People are less sure of who will be pitted against whom and so on, than they were in any of the previous election years. It’s the same situation in most democracies. People aren’t clear of the direction their countries would take, and this sort of confusion is not without its consequences.
Though the electorate is highly polarised, in most situations it would be unwise to assume that there will be positive changes if people always choose a party in Opposition, over the Government in power.
Though polarisations are rife and politics is divided into camps fiercely pitted against one another, it is clear that these parties are mostly clones of each other when it comes to economic policy. The left parties are moving to the centre, and there is only one choice on offer mostly, which isn’t exactly people-friendly but is loosely put, market-friendly.
What were all those polarisations for then? They were in the cause of politicians trying to divide the people and exploit their discontents with issues that are not always relevant. People are pitted ferociously against each other, but it seems somebody else always steals the biscuit.
