Have Sri Lankan Presidential Elections been all about party and not an individual? It could be argued that when J. R. Jayewardene introduced the Presidency he chose a format that would project, above all, his imposing personality. He created a powerful Presidency no doubt, and that has been the argument against the institution from the time it was created i.e. that the Constitution bestows too much authority on a single person.
But Constitutional power is one thing, and the trappings entirely another. Jayewardene, it is suspected, wanted the Presidency to be a projection of personality. He wanted people to vote for him because he was J. R. Jayewardene, and not because he was the leader of the United National Party.
By sheer force of his personal appeal, he tried to poach votes away from other political parties, and it could, of course, be argued that he succeeded because he obtained a five-sixths majority.
The problem with that statement is that it would be patently false. He obtained a five-sixths majority first, and then created the Presidency. He won one Presidential Election after that, having deprived his main opponent of civic-rights and then having ensured for good measure that the replacement was a pushover, compared to the opponent he had shackled with the civic-rights manoeuvre.
In retrospect, it could be argued that the creator of the system, J.R. J. was not considered any differently from any other candidate, by the average voter. People voted for J. R. J. because he was the leader of the UNP. They didn’t vote for Hector Kobbekaduwa, Sirimavo Bandaranaike’s replacement, because he was a mere shadow of the domineering party leader, Mrs Bandaranaike.
To that extent it could be argued that the Presidency is personality based. If Sirimavo Bandaranaike had contested J. R. J. in 1982, the result of that Presidential contest may well have been different. However, in this writer’s opinion, J. R. J. would have won anyway, though, perhaps, more narrowly than he did over Kobbekaduwa, in such a hypothetical match-up.
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Each Presidential Election after that has been party-based, with almost every successive one being solidly more party-based than the one preceding it. If Presidential Elections were personality based, perhaps, Sarath Fonseka would have had a bigger impact in the showdown against Mahinda Rajapaksa in 2010.
What’s deceptive though is that people talk of the candidate more than they talk of the party, as any Presidential Election approaches. That is the nature of a Presidential contest, as a particular candidate becomes the face of his or her party’s Presidential ambitions.
But all Presidential Elections in this country have been won by those who have been supported by either one of the top-tier parties. Of course, from time to time, the top-tier parties would have changed names and symbols or would have morphed into completely new parties altogether, the way the large chunk of the SLFP morphed into the SLPP for the 2019 presidential contest.
But, it was always a candidate supported by the top-tier parties that clinched the prize. It would be argued that this is the norm in most countries that have the Presidential system of Government. But at least in France that changed, when Emmanuel Macron emerged from a centrist-party and managed to upset the polling and the electoral calculus of the major party candidates.
France, perhaps, had a more personality based Presidential election culture to begin with, which is probably why J. R. Jayewardene would often boast that he had borrowed from the French system in the main, when he introduced the Presidency to this country.
However, does a party-based Presidential contest transform into a personality joust when the two main contending parties are running close? This seems to be what obtains in the United States, for instance. All but a few Presidential elections have been close in the recent past in the US, and in the final lap, the voter preferences seem to be decided on the basis of who the voters prefer as an individual, in their estimation, to occupy the White House.
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It doesn’t mean that the party dynamic doesn’t play an important role, but then in close races, the outcome is sometimes decided by a few thousand votes in the closely contested states in the U.S that are labelled as toss-up. In these states, the individual candidates tout their brands, and it is clear by the pre-election rhetoric that they often rely on the individual appeal of their personalities to propel them across the finish line.
We have in this country, had popular politicians or politicians with massive name recognition winning memorable Presidential Election showdowns. Both Mahinda Rajapaksa and Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga were such candidates who had a clear name recognition advantage over their rivals. However, on the flip side, Maithripala Sirisena didn’t quite have that advantage when he was elected, even though he had served as a fairly high-profile Minister in the Government that was displaced. When Gotabaya Rajapaksa won the 2019 contest fairly decisively, he did so almost entirely due to the backing of the SLPP, which had established itself as the main opposition party at that time, as the SLFP had, by then, allied with the ruling UNP, and sacrificed opposition status as a result.
There hasn’t been any third-party candidate who has even come close to the contenders from the two main political parties in any Presidential contest in the history of all Presidential races in this country. Would that fact presage the outcome in the forthcoming contest in 2024? It probably will, if people continue to vote on the party-basis as they always did in every Presidential contest since the first Presidential face-off between Jayewardene and Kobbekaduwa in 1982.
If a Presidential Election was personality based, we’d see prospective candidates such as Anura Kumara Dissanayake projecting their personalities as the main draw-card, but we don’t see that happening. Instead, even the NPP contends that the party line-ups have changed and that the NPP has come to the fore as one of the major political alignments, usurping the SLPP and the SJB which are the main left-wing and right-wing forces — or the traditional parties — in the mix.
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You’d notice that again the NPP’s call to the electorate goes out on the basis of party and not personality, in what is after all a Presidential contest, where the personality of the candidate should matter. But apparently this is not a consideration that the NPP sees as important.
They’d rather say it’s a party game, and claim “Ours is now a party that is superior to the traditional best”. They’d have to completely destroy the block-vote of at least one of the traditional political blocs if they are to carry this off, and win the Presidential Election as a new party that the majority prefers over the two traditional right and left-wing political blocks.
This is a decidedly different approach from say that of Mr. Macron when he won the Presidential Elections in France as a first timer, without a substantial political backing from any political party either new or old. However, he essentially triumphed based singularly on the power of his personal appeal, and then proceeded to cobble together a political party to best represent the causes he championed.
Anura Kumara Dissanayake is not a Macron type candidate. His party hopes it has done the unthinkable and upset the power equation dominated by the two main political blocs. It is an audacious political calculation, probably not based on reality and facts. It would have been better for any aspiring Presidential candidate of his type to base their ambitions more on personality than party, but that’s not the NPP’s style.
The other two main traditional political parties at the end of the day would pull no stops to consolidate support for their chosen candidates, whoever they may be. That’s the tried and tested dynamic in any Presidential Election, and they know that. The big tent parties win.
