Did the NPP obtain a protest vote? For short, it is being called an ‘angry vote.’ The key question in this context is, did people mostly merely vote against others when they voted NPP?
The question is largely academic. So what if it is assumed that the people voted against the other contenders in the main, when they voted for Mr. Anura Kumara Dissanayake and the NPP? Though there is no way to ascertain this in concrete terms, there is some background to take the claim seriously that the vote for the NPP at the Presidential election, was simply against the other conventional political parties in the main.
That may be the case or not, but if it was, it means the other parties were hated, and the NPP wasn’t. Not being hated is a massive plus in these times, when politicians in this country are decidedly not top of the pops.
The insinuation, therefore, that the Government got in by default is not a serious one. It takes some work to be unscathed in a general environment in which politics per se is toxic. Today, the Opposition has launched a new slogan for the General Election campaign. It is that the people have now voted, and their anger, therefore, is spent. Spent anger ergo, they say, translates as status quo restored.
There is some optimism overload here. In the first place, the Opposition by giving air time to this new slogan, acknowledges first that the people were angry to begin with, second that the anger was directed at them, and third that there was no such anger directed at the NPP. Once these three realities are acknowledged, it is rather risky, to put it mildly, to court more anger from an already angered people by claiming “the people’s anger is spent.”
TENURE
The Opposition may be shooting itself unnecessarily in the foot. If it is assumed that the people didn’t in fact love the NPP but voted for their guy anyway because they had come to loathe the others, all the NPP has to do now is to court and win the approval of the masses. The Opposition has a much more formidable task. It has to fend off the tide of hatred that had built up against it, and how they could assume that tide gets spent after they lost — repeat lost — one election particularly badly, is rather amazing to contemplate.
Why was the NPP not hated, when all other major political parties were? To put it in simple terms for the sake of the record, it is because the others were all tainted by recent incumbency. The Pohottuwa led by Namal Rajapaksa, was enormously tainted by incumbency after the Gotabaya fiasco and the economic implosion that followed. It was also tainted by the earlier misdeeds that were somehow ignored in 2019, but had re-surfaced in people’s minds after the massive economic meltdown of 2022.
But the UNP and the SJB, which incidentally were both earlier the UNP, were also tainted by the incumbency from 2015 to 2019. The people would not forget that UNP rule from 2015 was a period in which positive economic growth was reversed to negative numbers, and far more foreign debt was incurred than during the previous regime of the Rajapaksas. In addition, the bond scam happened, and all of this laid the groundwork for the economic collapse that was to follow in 2022 in the tenure of the new Gotabaya administration.
The people connected the dots. They could visibly feel the economy deteriorating under the cohabitation regime between Sirisena and Wickremesinghe, that went notoriously sour. The NPP did not suffer any fallout from such recent incumbency, because the NPP wasn’t associated with any of these regimes, or part of any of them.
Ranil Wickremesinghe was able to redeem himself somewhat from the malaise of incumbency-anger towards his 2015-19 regime, by engineering a recovery of sorts as selected President in the period 2022-2024. But he only succeeded in going from the utterly defeated man with no seats won in Parliament — except for a single bonus seat that fell on his lap — to a man who got 17 percent of the vote.
This history of malaise and the incumbency-anger directed towards those who were in Government in recent times, runs deep. It’s why a livid national electorate chose to send the conventional parties a message by electing a party that was by and large never incumbent, though in the somewhat distant past it had been associated with certain Governments in so-called ‘probationary’ and other temporary governance arrangements.
But the NPP was not tainted in the least by incumbency in the critical period, which was post 2015, and ergo, wasn’t hated. If that, is at least theoretically, the sole driver of its candidate’s victory, so what? In any event the Jury is out on whether hatred against other parties was in the main, the cause of the NPPs decisive win a month back. The NPP re-invented itself, and addressed weak points in the party apparatus before the 2024 Presidential election.
The post-election verdict is that in effect, the UNP, SLPP and SJB have to regain the love and respect of the masses. The NPP, on the other, hand has to earn such love and respect for the first time, for the simple reason that it was never a party that occupied the seats of power, and due to this history was neither loved nor hated.
respect
Regaining lost respect is probably a lot harder than gaining adoration and respect that was never there in the first place. As far as the other orthodox parties are concerned, there is a breach of trust that marked their downfall. The people trusted them to do the minimum to help keep the country and the economy on even keel.
But they failed and couldn’t be bothered honouring even a modicum of trust reposed in them. Under these circumstances, the NPP became the default option, but that’s better than being utterly, rudely rejected by the voters.
Today, the Opposition seems to be owning the rejection it experienced at the hands of the voters. Most veteran politicians who contested and got into Parliament as a matter of routine, have voluntarily retired and announced that they are not getting in the fray this time around.
They are scared, not of the NPP or the so-called violent propensities of the onetime JVP, but of losing and being humiliated in defeat. It seems they are aware the people would go for the default option — the NPP — at all costs.
The NPP may not want to be labelled default. Yet it sure beats being labelled as a reject, as a wag observed. The party has fielded those who are largely unknown to the masses as General Election candidates.
That’s an asset when most known politicians have acquired a bad rap. These candidates have to thrive on the advantage of relative obscurity. It is not possible to cleanse all politics of negativity, and some of the new lot are also bound to come in for criticism with time.
But it is sufficient if a certain core image of competency and incorruptibility is maintained. The NPP can do without being loved if its politicians are respected. J.R. Jayewardene though obviously cut from a different cloth than the JVP folk, did not crave adoration.
But the Old Fox knew that though people may not be besotted with him, he to a great extent had earned their grudging respect. This was true, though the Jayewardene image had taken a battering by the time his tenure had ended, due to terrorism and some bad decisions that he took. But the point about respect was valid. The quasi-celebrity culture attached to politics can expire now, in 2024. The NPP can field candidates who may seem boring, but the people have had a surfeit of exciting, and got tired of that to the point of being nauseated.
They want politics to be normal again, with MPs being less garrulous and flashy, but simply trustworthy enough to do the job.
