 |
| The Presidential Secretariat in Colombo. File pix |
By Veeragathy Thanabalasingham
The people of Sri Lanka who voted in the Presidential Election yesterday (21), the first opportunity to exercise their right to vote after an unprecedented economic crisis and a popular uprising, will have a president to lead the country for the next five years.
The new president has a huge responsibility as people have high expectations for solutions to their economic, social, and political problems. No matter how many votes this president gets, he will be leading a nation that is deeply divided both politically and ethnically.
There is a danger that these divisions will deepen as the Parliamentary Elections will follow soon.
This time, the Presidential Election was dominated by the economic crisis. It cannot be said that the people have elected a new president by recognising the differences in the proposals presented by the main candidates in their manifestos to rid the country of this crisis, since the economic restructuring programme under the guidance of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), which has been carried out for over two years, will continue.
As such, people will expect immediate steps from the new president to reduce the cost of living, which they are unable to cope with due to the austerity measures and heavy taxes the Government has introduced on the advice of the IMF. The important question is how quickly he will be able to do it. Either way, the new president will need to rethink the direction of economic restructuring and correct its adverse effects.
Since all the main candidates have declared that they will continue to carry out the IMF programme, the support of the people for the new president cannot be considered in any way as support for the programme. There is no doubt that the promises made by the main candidates competitively, with the sole purpose of winning the election without considering the economic condition of the country, will exert tremendous pressure on the new president. He will also have to keep his mind on the upcoming Parliamentary Elections.
This being so, the absence of racial propaganda in the south this time around in the election is a salutary feature that was highly noticeable. This is because the main candidates sought the support of the minority communities and reached out to them.
The candidates had made certain promises in their election manifestos regarding the solution to the ethnic problem. The new president needs to ensure that this harmonious atmosphere without racial feeling continues in order to get the support of the majority community for future attempts at solving the national problem.
By abandoning the usual practice of throwing election promises to the wind and putting efforts to solve the ethnic problem on the backburner, the new president can prevent the re-emergence of ethnic majoritarian mobilisation by devoting himself to solving the problem without delay.
The solutions to the challenges facing the country lie not only in economic restructuring but also in building a political system that respects the rights and aspirations of all communities. If the new president is willing to adopt an approach that makes efforts to resolve the ethnic problem through devolution of power an integral aspect of the economic recovery, it will certainly have the full support of all communities in Sri Lanka and the international community.
Tamil political parties should have held negotiations before the election to obtain assurances from the main candidates that they would not oppose the new president if he were to make efforts to find a solution to the ethnic crisis. But it is a great curse of the Tamil nationalist political culture that it gives much importance to emotional slogans that simply bind the Tamil people to the memories of the past and not to prudent strategic approaches suitable for the prevailing situation.
Promising a new constitution has been a strategy adopted by political parties in recent decades to delay finding solutions to pressing issues. Therefore, it would be wrong to believe that people would have voted for anyone based on that promise again on this occasion.
There are no statesmen among us to refute the empirical fact that no politician who comes to power as the executive president would ever want to abolish the system. That is the main reason why people’s trust in the political class has eroded. Can we expect a different approach from the new leader of the country? (Coursesy- The Sunday Morning/Sept22, 2024)
(The weriter is a senior journalist based in Colombo)
Post a Comment