Left winger wins Sri Lanka presidential election

Anura Kumara Dissanayake won the Sri Lanka presidential election

Sri Lanka elected left winger Anura Kumara Dissanayake as president on Sunday in an election that saw establishment parties trounced. 

Dissanayake is the leader of the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP) party. It used to describe itself as Marxist but has moved steadily rightwards over decades.

Nevertheless, his party has been able to galvanise a large part of the political anger that exploded into a rebellion in 2022. A general strike combined with a street protest movement to overthrow years of dictatorship by the hated Rajapaksa family.

Mithun Jayawardana is one of the rebels famously pictured swimming in the president’s pool after he left the country in a hurry. He told BBC news this week, “We need a president who is elected by the people. The people didn’t elect the current president.”

Dissanayake fought the election on two key promises. First, to root out the endemic political corruption associated with both the Rajapaksas, and the Ranil Wickremesinghe government that followed it.

Wickremesinghe won just 17 percent of the vote to Dissanayake’s 42 percent, coming third.

Second, to renegotiate the terms of the 2023 International Monetary Fund (IMF) bailout loan. The international bankers behind the IMF had demanded an austerity plan. It hit the poor so hard that many could no longer afford basics, such as food and gas to cook it with.

Now there is a mood of celebration in the poorest neighbourhoods, so much so that the army announced a curfew on the night of the election results.

But for Dissanayake, the JVP, and its National People’s Party alliance, the real tests are still to come.

Neither Sri Lanka’s ruling class nor the IMF want the question of the country’s loan repayments reopened. And neither wants an end to the vicious austerity regime that immiserated the poor.

The JVP will soon find that bosses and bankers regard themselves as “above the law”, and that they are the “real” power behind the state.

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To make the kind of radical changes that Dissanayake talked about during the election, his party would have to call on the spirit of the rebellion of 2022.

That would mean millions of workers downing tools, and leaving offices, schools and plantations to demonstrate their power. 

But any such move would be a declaration of class war—and that is something that Dissanayake is desperate to avoid.

Instead, he will likely seek conciliation, offering his government as a mediating force between the angry masses and the bankers. 

Millions of workers and the poor have been made to pay a terrible price for the greed and corruption of the Sri Lankan ruling class.

And they risked everything in the battle to get rid of dictatorship.

Many of them will applaud this week’s election result, but the arrival of the Dissanayake government must not mark the end of their struggle.