Anura Kumara Dissanayake achieved what once looked politically impossible: he took a movement from the margins of Sri Lankan politics to the Presidency and then secured 159 seats in Parliament. Nearly two years later, the more interesting question is no longer how AKD won. It is what he will ultimately do with power on a scale few Sri Lankan leaders have possessed.
Anura Kumara Dissanayake has already secured his place in Sri Lanka’s political history. Whether he secures the place he wants in its economic and institutional history remains unresolved.
The scale of the transformation is worth remembering. The political tradition from which Dissanayake emerged spent decades outside the centre of governmental power. Today the National People’s Power occupies 159 of Parliament’s 225 seats while the principal Opposition, the SJB, has 40.
Submit Your Press Release
Get your company news, announcements, launches, appointments and events in front of a wider audience.
That majority gives President Dissanayake something most democratic leaders can only envy: political room. He cannot plausibly explain an inability to pass ordinary legislation by pointing to a hostile Parliament. He does not depend upon an unstable coalition assembled from competing parties. His Government possesses the numbers to pursue a substantial programme.
But enormous parliamentary power creates enormous political responsibility. AKD also arrived carrying something less measurable but equally important: expectation.
His movement was not elected merely to administer Sri Lanka slightly better than its predecessors. It promised a different political culture. Corruption, privilege, waste, abuse of power and the relationship between politicians and the State formed part of the argument that brought the NPP into office.
That makes the standard against which it will ultimately be judged unusually high. There is already an interesting contradiction in the AKD presidency, although not necessarily an unhealthy one: the insurgent politician became a cautious President.
Dissanayake entered office with an economy too fragile to withstand drastic shocks. His administration continued broadly within the economic stabilisation programme it inherited rather than attempting to dismantle it, while placing its own emphasis on governance, anti-corruption and the conduct of the State.
That is politically significant. The movement that spent years attacking Sri Lanka’s established economic and political order discovered, once responsible for the Treasury, reserves, debt and international financing, that government imposes disciplines opposition does not.
That is not necessarily hypocrisy. It may simply be government.
The more revealing test is whether AKD can combine economic pragmatism with the political transformation he promised. That is considerably harder.
Arresting somebody accused of corruption attracts headlines. Building institutions in which corruption becomes structurally difficult attracts fewer. Removing an extravagant privilege is popular, while creating procurement systems capable of resisting political interference for the next twenty years is less visible.
Changing politicians is relatively easy. Changing the State is extraordinarily difficult.
This may ultimately become the defining distinction of the Dissanayake presidency. If his anti-corruption programme depends principally upon the integrity of Anura Kumara Dissanayake and the people immediately around him, Sri Lanka will have achieved less than it imagines. If it produces institutions that remain independent when AKD himself is eventually gone, it will have achieved something much more important.
The same applies to economic reform. Sri Lanka is growing again, but economic stabilisation and economic transformation are different things.
Stabilisation repairs the patient. Transformation changes what made the patient sick.
Sri Lanka still needs substantially greater investment, exports, productivity, competition and well-paid employment. It still has to confront inefficient parts of the State, and it must do so while protecting citizens who absorbed an extraordinary economic shock.
This is where AKD’s huge parliamentary majority can become either his greatest asset or his greatest danger. A large majority allows difficult reform, but it can also weaken scrutiny.
The Government has 159 MPs against an Opposition divided among considerably smaller groups. That imbalance makes the Government’s own attitude toward criticism particularly important. A confident administration should not fear questions simply because they are uncomfortable.
Parliamentary scrutiny, independent journalism, courts, auditors, regulators and a functioning Opposition are not inconveniences standing between a good government and progress. They are part of the machinery that helps prevent a good government from eventually becoming a bad one.
Sri Lanka has learned that lesson repeatedly. The President therefore faces a fascinating choice: he can use 159 seats primarily to govern quickly, or he can use the security provided by 159 seats to build institutions strong enough eventually to constrain even his own Government.
The second would be much more unusual.
There is also the matter of time. Political mandates depreciate. The enthusiasm surrounding a new government inevitably encounters electricity bills, taxes, food prices, jobs, strikes, bureaucracy and the ordinary irritations of governing.
At that point citizens stop comparing the Government with its promises. They compare their lives with their expectations.
That is why the next phase of AKD’s presidency may be more difficult than the first. Winning power required persuading Sri Lankans that the old political order had failed. Using power requires demonstrating that the new one works.
Those are entirely different political skills.
AKD’s supporters can point to economic stability, continuing growth and an administration that says it is confronting corruption and attempting to change the culture of government. His critics can demand faster improvements in living standards, stronger institutional safeguards and evidence that investigations and enforcement are consistent rather than politically selective.
Both propositions can be tested over time. And that is precisely why AKD should be judged neither as the revolutionary some once feared nor as the national saviour others imagined.
He should be judged as President.
By what happened to the economy, what happened to institutions, whether corruption became harder, whether government became more competent and whether opportunity widened. Ultimately, the bigger test is whether Sri Lanka becomes a country in which the quality of government depends less upon the identity of the person occupying the Presidential Secretariat.
Anura Kumara Dissanayake has something his predecessors frequently wished they possessed: the numbers.
History will be considerably more interested in what he did with them.
Be that as it may.
