Dual edges of national government

President Maithripala Sirisena’s statement that the coalition Government will remain intact beyond the initially stipulated two years received mixed reactions from stakeholders and provides a turning point in the discourse that has surrounded the ‘Yahapalanaya’ movement over the last 18 months. 

President Sirisena made the statement at the Moragahakanda ceremony and is reported to have repeated it when he met with dissenting members of the Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP) on the same day. 

According to reports, the decision to continue the coalition Government was to present a united front to local and international stakeholders to assure them of the stability of the Government but the development can be read in several ways.  

Increasingly the political reading of the results of the previous general election is that neither the United National Party (UNP) nor the Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP) received an outright mandate from the people, therefore justifying the decision to continue a coalition Government. On the surface the continuation of the present system could be viewed as a reinforcement of the stability of the Sirisena-Wickremesinghe nexus where the president and the prime minister will use their respective parties to ensure that the supporters of former president Mahinda Rajapaksa will be pushed further towards the fringes.  The president in particular appears to be working harder to steadily increase his power within the SLFP and has sternly told dissenting members that he will be forced to remove them if they do not toe the party line. 

Under the extension of the unity Government the pending local government election will have little impact as whatever the results the central government would be hardly affected. Even if supporters of Rajapaksa manage to make inroads at the election the SLFP can depend on UNP support and vice versa to ensure its electorate presence remains largely unscathed. Voters, always a practical breed, are likelier to vote for a realistic goal than attempt to start a long battle to revert to a rejected political establishment. When the initial accord was signed between the two main parties many people felt that the Government had undertaken too many tasks to be completed in two years. Just the Constitution building exercise was enough to ensure that the unity Government would have to stay the course longer than 24 months. Moreover, many legal requirements that need the two-thirds majority of Parliament, including the implementation of reconciliation and economic policies, build a case for the two parties to remain in power together.    

Therefore on many levels the continuation of the unity Government makes sense for both the UNP and the Sirisena-faction of the SLFP. The pitfalls are on the side of governance and policy implementation. Coalition Governments are cumbersome things with many crucial economic sectors duplicated over several ministries generating extra reels of red tape. It is harder to reconcile different economic outlooks when two parties are attempting to manage the economy; a fact that was well demonstrated during the VAT implementation. 

Perhaps the biggest casualty is governance as the absence of a strong and effective Opposition leaves room for corruption to increase and bad appointments to be made. This, coupled with conflicting ideals and messy decision-making, is detrimental to macroeconomic consolidation, which is the core of economic rejuvenation. Both the president and the prime minister will have to manage these negatives to protect political interests while delivering growth.