By

C.A.Chandraprema

After the unexpected and very substantial recovery of the UNP in the Badulla district and to a lesser extent in the Moneragala district, one would have thought that the party would by now be brimming with confidence and preparing to give Mahinda Rajapaksa a run for his money at the forthcoming presidential election. Before the Uva election, confidence was building up within the UNP, and clear signals were given that the UNP would be fielding Ranil Wickremesinghe to contest Mahinda Rajapaksa. Tissa Attanayake the General Secretary of the UNP told The Island in an interview that RW was the best possible choice for the presidential candidacy. Moreover, he said that the UNP parliamentary group has decided that the common candidate had to be from the UNP this time and not from outside.

Yet surprisingly even after the formidable showing of the UNP in Uva, this mood seems to have evaporated and once again, some UNP stalwarts seem to be looking at fielding a common candidate from outside. What is even more surprising is that this desire for a common candidate representing all opposition political parties seems to have affected individuals in both the Ranil and Sajith factions of the UNP in equal measure.

Confusion has been spreading within the UNP with certain sections expressing their preference for a common candidate from outside. Last Friday, some former UNP office bearers and parliamentarians had gathered at the Kotte Naga Viharaya where the Ven Maduluwawe Sobitha resides and declared in favour of a common opposition candidate. Among these UNP veterans were Daham Wimalasena, Anura Bastian, Upali Piyasoma, M. G. Premaratne, Madhurapala Ediriweera and Mahen Gunasekara.

In the meantime, the newly appointed Assistant Leader of the UNP Ravi Karunanayake declared in favour of a common candidate in an interview with The Island and parliamentarian Ajith P.Perera was also in favour of a common candidate according to reports in other newspapers.

Today, even after the surprisingly good showing in Uva, everybody in the UNP seems to be running around like headless chickens not knowing whom to put forward against Mahinda Rajapaksa. On the one hand, some in the UNP probably feel that if the UNP contests the election alone, they are going to lose hands down and that if they are to have at least a chance at winning, everybody has to be roped in and in order to do that the price they would have to pay is to be flexible on the choice of a candidate. So they feel it would be impolitic to insist that the common candidate has to be from within the UNP.

As the UNP’s new Assistant Leader Ravi Karunanayake put it in his interview in The Island last week, the common candidate will be contesting on the pledge that he would abolish the executive presidency within three months of assuming office, therefore it really did not matter who the common candidate is. The strange thing is that before the Uva election when the most that the UNP had scored was 26% in the Western province and 25% in the Southern province, the UNP was confidently saying that the next candidate has to be from within the UNP, but now after getting 44% of the vote in the Badulla district, they have got cold feet and are willing to compromise on the candidacy!

The incremental approach

On the one hand, this willingness to compromise on the choice of candidate may be due to a sobering realization that a good showing in the Uva province does not mean victory. Even in Uva, the UNP did well only in the Badulla district which every UNPer knows was always a solidly UNP district which they had always won until 2010. Every UNPer knows that they have lost many elections while winning handsomely in the Badulla district and they know that the fact that are still losing in the Badulla district by a small margin means that they have very little chance of winning the next presidential election which is due within the next three months. Hence the desire to please other political parties to garner their support to topple the Rajapaksa regime.

One cannot but feel that this willingness to compromise on the candidacy is also due to an overriding desire for a quickie victory, and an inability to wait and work incrementally towards a victory. If the UNP is unable to make it on its own the attempt is to rope in as many others as possible to take a short cut to power. If we look at the manner the SLFP gradually worked their way upwards after 1977, we see a good example of an incremental approach. When the SLFP lost the parliamentary election of 1977, they had 1.8 million votes. At the 1982 presidential elections, the SLFP vote increased to 2.5 million votes. The SLFP had got nearly 700,000 new votes that they never had earlier, thanks largely to the election campaign that Vijaya Kumaratunga led. The showing that the SLFP put up at the 1982 presidential election was not due to any ‘recovery’ of the SLFP. There was nothing to recover really. The SLFP got 1.8 million votes when they were elected to power in 1970 and they got 1.8 million votes when they lost power in 1977 so there were no votes to recover as such.

What the SLFP got in 1982 was an increase of nearly 700,000 completely new votes that the SLFP had never got earlier. The SLFP got a reduced number of votes at the 1988 presidential election held at the height of the JVP’s second insurrection at 2.2 million votes and at the parliamentary election of 1989 which followed, which was also during the JVP insurrection, the SLFP got only 1.7 million votes. But with the split in the UNP and the assassination of all the UNP’s front rankers by the LTTE, the SLFP made gains at the provincial council elections held in May 1993 and won in the Western and Southern provinces. At the 1994 parliamentary elections, the SLFP led coalition got 3.8 million votes and won. So this represents a case of a political party making incremental advances over 17 long years to get into power.

If we take the UNP after the defeat of 1994, they too were able to make a comeback only through an incremental process. In August 1994 at the moment defeat at the parliamentary election the UNP got 3.4 million votes. Five years later at the presidential election of 1999 they got 3.6 million votes. At the 2001 parliamentary election they got 4 million votes and formed a government. We see that at the moment of victory in 2001, the UNP had about 600,000 new votes that they did not have at the moment of defeat in August 1994. So we see that both the SLFP and the UNP managed to get back into power only through a gradual increase of votes over a period of time. In this unseemly scramble to find a common candidate, we see signs of many in the UNP being in a hurry and unable to wait for a gradual and incremental progression towards forming a government. They don’t seem to realize that not waiting for that incremental approach may be a bad mistake that will retard their progress and even reverse the small gains made at the Southern and Western PC elections and the significant gains made at the Uva PC elections held this year.

Still reeling from the drubbing of 2010

Nobody in the UNP seems to have done an assessment of the damage they did to themselves by fielding a common candidate in 2010. When General Sarath Fonseka was made the common candidate at the end of 2009, he was a war hero who had led the victorious army at the moment of its victory over the LTTE. Ranil Wickremesinghe was on the contrary labelled as a ‘traitor’ who had sold out to the terrorists with the ceasefire agreement and had ridiculed the war effort. Yet this writer very confidently predicted that Fonseka, even with the support of the entire combined opposition, will not get the vote that Ranil Wickremesinghe got contesting as a UNP candidate in 2005. And to be sure, SF fell short of the high reached by RW by well over half a million votes.

Of course we have to consider what would have happened if Sarath Fonseka had not been the common candidate in 2010 and Ranil Wickremesinghe had been pitted against MR. We have to admit that in the wake of the war victory, RW would never have got the 4.17 million votes that Fonseka got. But then again, if RW had been MR’s opponent in 2010, the gap between the winner and the loser would not have been as large as 1.8 million votes either. If Ranil had contested the 2010 presidential election, it would have been a cakewalk for Mahinda and due to widespread complacency on the part of the UPFA voters and apathy among the UNP voters, the voter turnout would have been low and both sides would have got vastly reduced numbers of votes. RW would have got very much less than what he got in 2005. Despite this, the UNP voter base would at least have been intact without getting UNP voters accustomed to voting outside the party.

The SLFP may have stayed in the opposition for 17 long years from 1977 to 1994, but they never ever got the SLFP voter to vote outside the party. That was the secret of their success. At the 2004 parliamentary election, SLFP voters did cast preference votes for JVP candidates after voting for the SLFP led coalition, but those were just preference votes, not votes for the party. This was of course reciprocated by the JVP by getting their voters to vote for the SLFP candidate at the 2005 presidential election. But the bottom line is that the SLFP voter has not voted outside a coalition led by the SLFP. The UNP made the mistake of doing this and even after the presidential and parliamentary elections of 2010, the UNP’s recovery has been slow as a result. Even as late as last year, General Fonseka’s party was getting large numbers of votes and multiple seats at provincial council elections (North Central, North Western, Western and Southern) that would otherwise have gone to the UNP. Fonseka’s party has an unbelievable nine seats in the Western Provincial Council – all won obviously on the votes of disgruntled UNPers.

It was only with Harin Fernando coming into Uva and giving them some hope and an apparent rapprochement taking place between RW and Sajith in Passara that turned the tide and wiped out Sarath Fonseka’s party and got the disgruntled UNP votes that were going to him back into the UNP. The only problem the UNP has had to face as a result of the 2010 common candidate fiasco is not just some disgruntled party men voting for Fonseka. We see that even in the Colombo city, the hitherto rock solid UNP base has begun collapsing. At the Western PC election held earlier this year, the UNP got only 28% in North Colombo, 45.9%, Colombo Central 41.8%, Borella, 32.7%, Colombo East and 32.9%. Colombo West The average works out to about 36%. Up to that point, the UNP’s base among the minority community voters in Colombo city had been very firm. This writer believes that one of the reasons the minority voters of the UNP are now voting outside the UNP for small ethnic parties is because they unwisely got their members used to voting outside the party in 2010.

The politics of the grease pole

Now if the UNP makes the mistake of fielding an outsider as the common candidate yet again, more of the UNP’s vote based may be eaten into by outsiders in the future. As far as the party block vote goes it is always best to say vote for us and only us, or don’t vote at all! We all know that the UNP faced a massive collapse at the 1994 November presidential elections in the wake of the assassination of Gamini Dissanayke. The UNP vote percentage went down to just 35.9% down from 44% at the Parliamentary election held just a couple of months earlier. But the UNP bounced back to 42% at the 1999 presidential election and that marked a recovery which finally led to the victory at the December 2001 parliamentary election.

It should be remembered that by fielding a common candidate as formidable as General Sarath Fonseka, the UNP still went backwards not forwards. In addition that misadventure got the UNP voter used to the idea of voting outside of the party which explains why even the Colombo city voter who was hitherto unwaveringly loyal to the UNP, now votes outside the party for ethnic parties. In this context, everyone should be mindful of the fact that despite the recovery in Uva, Harin has still not managed to go back to the 2005 position. He managed to bring the UNP back to the 2010 January level from the low point reached at the 2010 April Parliamentary election as the following shows.

UNP votes in Badulla district

2005 Presidential election – 226,582

2010 Presidential election – 198,835

2010 Parliamentary election – 112,886

2014 Uva PC election – 197,708

The UNP should also think carefully about disturbing this recovery by fielding another outsider as a common candidate. We see that before Harin Fernando came on the scene, a recovery of sorts in the Badulla district had taken place back in 2011 at the local government elections. This was not noticed because there was not much sound and fury at that election. At the local government election in 2011, the UNP managed to get no less than 39.5% of the vote in the Badulla district. Now Harin has managed to bump that up to 44%. At the 2011 local government elections, the UNP won the Bandarawela MC and the Passara PS too. So this provided a platform that Harin has built on.

UNP performance in Badulla district at the Local Govt elections of 2011

Bandarawela MC – 49.8%

Haputale UC – 39.5%

Mahiyangana PS – 37%

Ridimaliyadda PS – 45%

Soranatota PS – 36%

Meegahakiula PS – 36.5%

Kandeketiya PS – 38%

Passara PS – 40%

Badulla PS – 43%

Hali Ela PS – 37%

Uva-Paranagama PS – 42%

Welimada PS – 38.6%

Bandarawela PS – 40.9%

Ella PS – 41.7%

Haputale PS – 39.7%

Haldumulla PS – 37.5%

Lunugala PS – 33%

Badulla MC – 33%

Total district percentage 39%

So we see that after the disastrous policy of fielding an outsider at the 2010 presidential election and losing a good part of the UNP vote base, they have been gradually recovering in the Badulla district through the local government election of 2011 and the Uva PC election of 2014. Now if they field a common candidate again, they may stand to lose all the gains they have made making politics in the UNP look like climbing the greasy pole – you climb halfway only to come slithering down without ever reaching the top! If Ranil Wickremesinghe contests Mahinda Rajapaksa there is the strong possibility that he will lose by a large margin, but at least the party voter would be given a rallying point with the green colour and the elephant symbol and most importantly the UNP voter would be kept within the fold without being encouraged to go wandering around.

The elusive winning formula

If the UNP agrees to field a common candidate from outside, there is the near certainty that he will be defeated even more soundly than Ranil Wickremesinghe with the additional damage of the UNP vote base getting dissolved and diluted in a common pool of ‘opposition votes’ who may begin to see Anura Kumara Dissanayake too as a fellow ‘common opposition member’. Perhaps the only way out of this conundrum is for the UNP to arrive at an understanding that Ranil Wickremesinghe should contest and even if he loses, no one should attempt to oust him from the leadership because it is not possible to make a comeback in a hurry after a comprehensive collapse like that of 2010.

Maithri Gunaratne, a pillar of the Sajith faction, says that the best candidate for the UNP would be Sajith Premadasa because he too appeals to the rural voter the same way that Mahinda does. As Maithri argues, the worst that can happen is that Sajith would lose but even in losing, Sajith would be able to do at the national level what Harin Fernando did at the district level – getting UNP voters to the polling booth and this would be a stepping stone to power at the next election.

In any case, Maithri G says that the choice of candidate should be made by the elected representatives of the UNP at the local government, provincial and parliamentary level and that he would fully support any candidate whether it be Sajith or Ranil chosen by the elected representatives of the party. The question that has to be asked ultimately is whether there is any potential common candidate anywhere in the horizon who has even a faction of the popular appeal that Sarath Fonseka had in 2009 when he became the common candidate? Today, even Fonseka himself does not have a fraction of the appeal he had in 2009.

There isn’t really anybody in the opposition who can match up to Ranil and Sajith in terms of being a candidate at a presidential election. Fielding a Buddhist monk as a common candidate was characterized as a joke by Dayan Jayatilleke and this writer can only agree. As for Karu Jayasuriya, he has shot himself in the foot not only by jumping from one side to the other but also displaying unbelievable opportunism in his dealings within the UNP. He does not have the confidence of either the Ranil or Sajith factions of the UNP. So even though the embassies would love him and even the JVP may find in him a suitably pliable common candidate, he will not be able to rally the UNP vote the way Ranil or Sajith can.

Perhaps the most damaging thing as far as the UNP is concerned is to be seen running around like headless chickens with each person saying a different thing about the candidate they are going to put forward. That gives the impression that they have lost the presidential race even before the election has been officially announced!

Courtesy:Sunday Island