On Thursday morning, 45 years to the day since he was first elected to parliament, Ranil Wickremesinghe was sworn in as the eighth president of Sri Lanka, replacing the ousted and exiled Gotabaya Rajapaksa. His path to executive power – the office Wickremesinghe has clamoured after for so many years – was extraordinary. As a searing editorial in Sri Lanka’s Daily FT newspaper put it on Thursday morning: “Wickremesinghe has no popular mandate and he has won the presidency by proxy.”
Many believe Wickremesinghe’s election, far from stabilising Sri Lanka after the toppling of Rajapaksa, will instead create ongoing turmoil and unrest. For a country grappling with the worst economic crisis since the great depression, the consequences could be severe.
Those in the Aragalaya protest movement, formerly fixated on the Rajapaksas, have vehemently turned their attention to the resignation of Wickremesinghe, once again uniting a movement that is otherwise riddled with competing political and social agendas.
Wickremesinghe is widely seen by protesters as the epitome of the political establishment they have vocally rejected. He stands accused of manipulating the political system to his advantage, and taking on the role of president with no public support, no legitimacy and no mandate. “We will have to throw him out,” said one protester, Anura Goonarata, on Wednesday. “Sometimes you have to shed blood to see change happen.”
Yet the crisis goes deeper than Wickremesinghe. For months, an unprecedented number of Sri Lankans have been protesting on the streets calling for political change and an end to the undemocratic system of executive presidency, and made their dislike of Wickremesinghe clear. The decision of elected lawmakers to vote him in as president regardless has widely been seen as evidence that parliament is working in direct opposition to the will and voice of the people.
“The legitimacy of not just the president and the prime minister, but the parliament itself has been lost,” said Ahilan Kadirgamar, a political economist and senior lecturer at the University of Jaffna. “It’s become clear that the ability for the protest movement to work with this parliament has become very difficult, so we are now looking at a more confrontational scenario.”
It was just two years ago that Wickremesinghe was facing the most humiliating defeat of his political career. After five years as prime minister, his reputation was in tatters and his party, the once-powerful United National party, had fallen apart.
It won less than 3% of the vote in the 2020 parliamentary elections and not a single candidate won their seat for MP. It was only because of Sri Lanka’s system of proportional representation that Wickremesinghe could re-enter parliament through a national list, making him the sole UNP lawmaker.
But it is not for nothing that Wickremesinghe is known as “the fox” and the “king of comebacks”: in recent days the rallying protest cry on the streets has been against “Deal Ranil”, a reference to decades of sly political manoeuvring.
It was thanks to an opaque backdoor deal with President Rajapaksa – who desperately needed an ally to come in to help prop up his regime, in the face of a collapsing government and mass protests – that Wickremesinghe became prime minister in May. By default, he was then made president after Rajapaksa resigned, and then became eligible to be a presidential nominee.
Wickremesinghe, however, has seemed untroubled by his lack of political mandate. After becoming prime minister in May, he directly compared himself to the former British prime minister Winston Churchill who “only had four members backing him in 1939. How did he become prime minister? Because of the crisis. I have done the same.”
Instead it was Rajapaksa’s party, the Sri Lanka Podujana Peramuna party (SLPP), that used its majority in parliament to elect Wickremesinghe as president in Wednesday’s secret ballot. Many view it as the latest in a long history of alleged Rajapaksa and Wickremesinghe collusion. Wickremesinghe’s close friendship with Mahinda Rajapaksa is well known. In 2015, when Wickremesinghe became prime minister, his promises to investigate corruption allegations into the Rajapaksa family came to nothing.
Wickremesinghe is now seen to be entirely dependent on the SLPP – and by default the Rajapaksas who still have considerable influence over the party – given that he is a president without a single MP from his own party and no other base of support in parliament. Notably, Mahinda Rajapaksa sat in the front row of Wickremesinghe’s swearing-in ceremony on Thursday.
His outraged response, hours after his election, at the suggestion by reporters he has a close relationship with the Rajapaksas – “How am I an old friend of the Rajapaksas? When did I know the Rajapaksas? I’ve been opposing them all this time” – therefore rang very hollow to many. There are few in Sri Lanka who believe Wickremesinghe will be the man to finally hold the Rajapaksas to account after all these years, either over corruption or Gotabaya Rajapaksa’s accusations of war crimes during the civil war, as the public are demanding.
Wickremesinghe’s weak political position as president may have other concerning consequences. In recent days he has made overtures to the military, in an apparent attempt to strengthen his support, leading to worries that he could open the door to an increasing prominence of the military in politics. He was quick to declare a state of emergency after he became president, which came with even more draconian police powers than when it was declared under Rajapaksa. He has also sought to cast protesters as groups infiltrated by “fascists” and “extremists” who have broken the law, in what many see as a precursor to an impending violent crackdown on the movement.
But in the face of what Kadirgamar described as Sri Lanka’s “great revolt”, he saw it as highly unlikely that Wickremesinghe would make it to the end of the presidential term in November 2024, as protests are set to resume with increased vigour in the next few months.
Yet the pressing worry remains that any continued political turmoil will hinder any chance of tackling the economic crisis, which is swiftly becoming a humanitarian crisis. While Wickremesinghe has promised a deal with the International Monetary Fund is near conclusion, and currency swaps with foreign countries are in the works, Sri Lanka will require more than outside foreign assistance to get it back on the path to recovery.
“Ranil has zero credibility with the people,” said Kadirgamar. “Therefore he cannot provide the strong leadership that is needed to get Sri Lanka out of this crisis.”
