Ranil is Everywhere Again. But Are the Voters There?

He is out of the Presidency. He is out of Parliament. Yet Ranil Wickremesinghe seems remarkably difficult to remove from Sri Lanka’s political conversation. There are speeches, meetings, policy proposals and increasingly visible attempts to bring the Opposition together. But there is one question that all the publicity in the world cannot answer: are Sri Lankan voters actually coming back to Ranil Wickremesinghe?

Ranil Wickremesinghe has achieved something rather extraordinary.

He lost the Presidency. He is not a Member of Parliament. The United National Party that he has dominated for decades is today a shadow of the electoral machine that once governed Sri Lanka.

And yet Ranil is everywhere.

He speaks. The media reports it. He meets politicians. It becomes news. He offers an economic prescription and it enters the national conversation. He talks about democracy, constitutional reform or the future of the Opposition and once again Ranil Wickremesinghe occupies political space considerably larger than the parliamentary representation of his party would appear to justify.

The question is whether that represents a genuine political revival.

Or are we confusing visibility with popularity?

There is an important difference.

Wickremesinghe undoubtedly retains influence. Forty-two years of legislative service, six periods as Prime Minister and a term as President have left him with relationships throughout politics, business, diplomacy and the bureaucracy. He knows the machinery of the Sri Lankan state perhaps better than almost anyone still active in politics.

He also has something that defeated politicians frequently lose: access to attention.

But attention is not an election.

The last occasion on which Sri Lanka’s voters were asked directly whether Ranil Wickremesinghe should remain President produced an unambiguous result.

At the 2024 presidential election, Anura Kumara Dissanayake received 5,634,915 votes, or 42.31 per cent. Sajith Premadasa received 4,363,035, or 32.76 per cent.

Wickremesinghe, despite contesting as the incumbent President and campaigning on his stewardship of the economic recovery following the 2022 collapse, received 2,299,767 votes 17.27 per cent.

That is nearly 2.1 million votes fewer than Premadasa and more than 3.3 million fewer than Dissanayake.

Those numbers cannot simply be wished away.

There was another warning sign.

Polling conducted shortly before that election suggested that support for Wickremesinghe personally was substantially greater than support for the UNP. In August 2024, the Institute for Health Policy estimated UNP general-election voting intention at just 9 per cent.

The distinction is crucial.

Ranil Wickremesinghe had a political constituency. The United National Party had a considerably smaller one. And therein lies perhaps the central problem confronting both man and party today.

For decades the UNP was one of the two great pillars of Sri Lankan politics. Governments changed, leaders came and went, but the UNP remained an institution capable of mobilising voters throughout the country.

That electoral infrastructure has fractured.

Much of its former political territory is now occupied by Sajith Premadasa’s Samagi Jana Balawegaya. The 2024 parliamentary election then demonstrated the scale of the transformation, with the NPP securing an overwhelming parliamentary majority while the traditional political establishment was reduced to fragments.

So what exactly is Ranil Wickremesinghe rebuilding?

Recent events provide some clues.

On September 19, Wickremesinghe unveiled what he described as a programme for Sri Lanka’s future, including proposals for constitutional and electoral reform, investment, employment and economic development. He said discussions would be conducted with political parties other than the NPP and spoke of eventually transferring responsibility to a younger generation.

There have also been attempts to encourage cooperation across the Opposition.

Most significantly, Wickremesinghe and Sajith Premadasa appeared on the same platform at the commemoration of J.R. Jayewardene’s 120th birth anniversary this week, amid continuing discussion about closer cooperation between the UNP and SJB.

Something is clearly moving.

But it does not necessarily follow that what is moving is the electorate.

That distinction is important because Sri Lankan political discussion has an extraordinary capacity to become self-referential. Politicians speak to journalists. Journalists speak to politicians. Political operatives speak to both. Social media amplifies all three.

Eventually everyone can become convinced that something enormous is happening.

The voter may be somewhere else entirely.

That is why claims of a Ranil resurgence require evidence beyond newspaper columns, television appearances, political meetings and social-media engagement.

Where is the polling?

Where is the demonstrable movement in voting intention?

Where is the evidence that the people who rejected Wickremesinghe in September 2024 have reconsidered him?

And perhaps most importantly, where is the evidence that younger voters who abandoned Sri Lanka’s traditional parties are returning to the UNP?

Until those questions can be answered, political visibility should not be mistaken for electoral recovery.

There is nevertheless another side to the Ranil story.

The circumstances under which he became President in 2022 were extraordinary. He inherited a bankrupt state after Gotabaya Rajapaksa fled the country and resigned. Whatever one’s political view of Wickremesinghe, the economy he eventually handed over was substantially more stable than the economy he inherited.

That provides him with a political argument which is unlikely to disappear.

His supporters can say: you may not like Ranil, but when the country was collapsing he took responsibility.

His opponents can respond that the stabilisation imposed enormous costs on ordinary Sri Lankans and that Wickremesinghe governed without having personally won the presidential mandate in 2019 or a parliamentary seat in 2020.

Both arguments will continue.

But the electorate has already had one opportunity to judge his post-crisis record. It gave him 17.27 per cent. There is also the matter of age and succession.

Wickremesinghe is now 77.

That does not constitutionally prevent him from contesting another presidential election. The Constitution disqualifies someone who has been twice elected President by the people; Wickremesinghe has not been twice elected President by the people.

The more interesting question therefore is not whether Ranil can contest again.

It is whether rebuilding Sri Lankan liberal-centrist politics around Ranil Wickremesinghe personally is the most plausible route being contemplated by those around him.

His own recent language contains an intriguing clue. He talks increasingly about programmes, coalitions and eventually handing responsibility to younger people.

Perhaps Ranil’s next political project is not actually another Ranil presidency.

Perhaps it is becoming kingmaker rather than king.

That would make considerably more sense of what we are watching.

An alliance or accommodation involving the UNP and SJB would bring together political organisations that once constituted a single electoral family. Wickremesinghe retains experience, international relationships and considerable political connections. Premadasa possesses something Wickremesinghe presently does not: the leadership of the principal parliamentary Opposition and a much larger demonstrated electoral base.

Whether the two political cultures can genuinely coexist is another question altogether.

There is also a simpler route back into Parliament.

Wickremesinghe is not constitutionally condemned to political retirement merely because he currently sits outside the House. A future parliamentary election could provide a route back if he contests and wins, while changes involving a party’s National List representation can also create parliamentary openings depending on the circumstances.

But again, legality is not political viability.

The UNP’s problem is not finding a parliamentary chair for Ranil Wickremesinghe.

It is finding voters for the UNP.

That is a much bigger job.

And this is where the remarkable efficiency of the Wickremesinghe political communications operation can become both an asset and a trap.

A sophisticated media operation can keep a politician relevant. It can ensure speeches are covered, arguments circulated and appearances noticed. It can remind the country that Ranil Wickremesinghe remains available.

What it cannot manufacture indefinitely is electoral consent.

There is an old political temptation to confuse what people in Colombo are talking about with what Sri Lanka is thinking.

The test of the Ranil revival therefore should not be how frequently his photograph appears in newspapers, how many television bulletins carry his comments or how enthusiastically his interventions circulate among political insiders.

Go to Galle. Go to Anuradhapura. Go to Matara, Kurunegala, Jaffna, Kandy, Monaragala and Gampaha.

Ask the shopkeeper.

Ask the teacher. Ask the three-wheeler driver. Ask the young graduate looking for his first job. Ask the family paying the electricity bill.

Then compare those answers with the conversation taking place inside Colombo’s political drawing rooms.

That would tell us considerably more.

Ranil Wickremesinghe should never be casually written off. Sri Lankan politics has done that to him before, sometimes spectacularly prematurely. A man whose party was reduced to a single National List seat in 2020 was President of Sri Lanka less than two years later.

But 2022 required an almost unimaginable combination of political circumstances.

A country collapsed. A President fled. A government disintegrated. Parliament selected the successor. A return to the Presidency through a nationwide election would be an entirely different proposition.

There is presently no sound evidential basis for saying that Wickremesinghe is on course to achieve it. Nor should the opposite conclusion be presented as certainty. Sri Lankan politics is too fluid for that.

What the evidence presently allows us to say is considerably simpler.

Ranil Wickremesinghe remains influential. Ranil Wickremesinghe remains relevant.

Ranil Wickremesinghe remains exceptionally good at ensuring that Sri Lanka continues talking about Ranil Wickremesinghe. But influence is not popularity. Publicity is not votes.

And relevance is not resurrection.

The next chapter of Ranil Wickremesinghe’s extraordinary political career may therefore depend upon whether he recognises that distinction himself.

He may yet return to Parliament.

He may attempt another presidential contest.

But there is a third possibility which deserves considerably more attention: that the final exercise of Ranil Wickremesinghe’s political influence will not be getting himself elected again but helping determine what replaces the political order that defeated him.

And perhaps, after nearly half a century at the centre of Sri Lankan politics, that is the more consequential question.

Be that as it may.