How worried should Sri Lanka be about its ex-Marxist president?
The political background of Anura Kumara Dissanayake, who was sworn in as president of Sri Lanka on September 23rd after winning a run-off election, looks alarming. His party, the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP), began as a revolutionary Marxist-Leninist movement that led two unsuccessful but bloody uprisings against the Sri Lankan state in the 1970s and 1980s. Tens of thousands of Sri Lankans were killed or simply “disappeared” in the insurrections and their suppression, which overlapped with a civil war between the government and Tamil rebels.
To his credit, Mr Dissanayake (widely known as AKD) has distanced himself from this gory past. On becoming party leader in 2014, he apologised for the killing of thousands of people by the JVP during the second, more brutal, uprising when he was part of its student wing, and said the party would never again take up arms. (There has never been a similar apology for atrocities committed by those in power at the time.)
He has also further softened the JVP’s ideology. The party had been playing down its Marxist origins for years, disavowing class struggle and its old rejection of private property (though members still call each other “comrade”). In his campaign this year Mr Dissanayake struck a conciliatory tone, stressing national unity and voicing support for a market economy. Since 2022, when mass protests ousted the then-president, Gotabaya Rajapaksa, a coalition assembled by the JVP and its associates has won broad support among middle-class Sri Lankans, whose living standards have been devastated by economic crisis and the austerity policies designed to fix it.
The main reason for worrying about Mr Dissanayake is not that he is a zealot. It is that he has little experience in government, barring a brief stint as agriculture minister two decades ago. Somehow, he must continue with painful reforms to keep the economy stable without alienating the people who elected him. It is an almost impossible task.
The economy collapsed under Mr Rajapaksa’s corrupt, eccentric regime, which divvied up power among the president’s relatives and indulged in outlandish policy experiments. Trying to turn the nation’s farms organic overnight, Mr Rajapaksa banned imports of chemical fertiliser, causing food production to collapse and living standards to plummet. Sri Lanka defaulted in April 2022. Three months later a crowd stormed Mr Rajapaksa’s palatial residence and he fled the country.
Ranil Wickremesinghe, his successor, brought down inflation, stabilised the currency and struck debt-restructuring deals with the IMF and other creditors, including India and China. However, he failed to salve the economic pain felt by ordinary people, and did little to curb graft or safeguard the rights of dissidents. He was also seen as too close to the Rajapaksa government that wrecked the country in the first place.
Mr Dissanayake campaigned on promises to root out corruption and renegotiate the deal with the IMF. If he reneges on that agreement, as some fear, Sri Lanka could be plunged back into economic crisis. So he is more likely to stick with it. But this means he will have little space to cut taxes or raise welfare spending, as he has promised. Debt payments are expected to gobble up half the budget next year, and Mr Dissanayake’s ideas for boosting growth remain maddeningly vague.
A failure to ease economic suffering could infuriate his supporters, undermining a government that is already weak. Mr Dissanayake’s leftist umbrella group held just three of 225 seats in the parliament he dissolved this week, and is unlikely to win a majority in the elections now scheduled for November. So he will probably end up governing with a fragile political coalition, possibly including members of the old establishment he promised to oust. Sri Lankans hoping for a reckoning with the past are likely to be disappointed, too: despite its rebellious history, the JVP is unlikely to support an investigation of atrocities committed during the long civil war.
Any or all of these issues may well hobble Sri Lanka’s new leader. Despite Mr Dissanayake’s clear mandate, his presidency is built on shaky ground, in a country that has little room for error. Wish him luck. ■