Whither Opposition?

Sri Lanka has stabilised its economy. It has not yet settled the argument about what kind of economy it wants. That argument is the unfinished business of the recovery, and the Opposition, whose job it is to offer the alternative, has yet to offer one that adds up. Instead, it has offered a litany of woes without solutions.

The IMF program was, by design, revenue-heavy. It required the primary balance, Government revenue minus non-interest spending, to move from a deficit of 3.8% of GDP in 2022 to a surplus of 2.3% from 2025. Households have paid much of the price, especially the poor: the World Bank estimates that poverty remains around twice its 2019 level.

That is fertile ground for any Opposition. Yet the political conversation stops at objection. Electricity pricing, fuel pricing, income tax, withholding tax on savings and the VAT threshold have all been fought over, each framed as a question of who should not pay. The harder question, who should pay instead, goes unanswered.

Relief for one group must be matched by revenue from another, or by spending cut elsewhere. If every revenue measure is opposed and every reform resisted, what exactly is the alternative? Accepting the IMF program and its targets in principle while resisting each measure needed to meet them is not an alternative design; it is the absence of one. Which taxes, on whom, at what thresholds and against which spending priorities? Asking those questions is easy. Answering them is the test of a government-in-waiting, and it is a test the Opposition has so far failed.

The Opposition's defenders argue that it has engaged on all of this, raising question after question in Parliament, and has failed only to dominate the narrative. A record of questions is not a program, however long the list. Narratives follow substance. An Opposition that objects to everything risks something worse than being ignored: not being taken seriously on the occasions when it is right.

Oppositions habitually accuse the Government of the day of failing to push back on the IMF's stringent technical conditions. Then the tables turn, as they always do. The JVP-led National People's Power (NPP) Government, which made much the same case in opposition, is now finding that out. The Opposition has not drawn the lesson. In Parliament yesterday, Opposition Leader Sajith Premadasa accused the Government of imposing 'untold burdens' through 'illiberal' and 'inhuman' taxation, and again charged that it was basing its arguments on false Central Bank of Sri Lanka (CBSL) data. Adjectives are not an alternative.

Nor does the data charge survive inspection. The CBSL's Sri Lanka Socio-Economic Data 2026 report depicts poverty using 2016 and 2019 figures because those are the last published rounds of the Department of Census and Statistics (DCS) household income and expenditure survey. The 2023 and 2025 editions carried the same tables, apparently without complaint. If this was deception, it went unnoticed for years. That is clutching at straws.

None of this lets the Government off: reforms passed on a majority alone, untested by credible alternatives, are vulnerable to reversal when power changes hands.

The DCS's 2025 survey of 25,000 households will give the debate its first official post-crisis measure of poverty. With the Budget due on 12 November, the Government must set out its assumptions on who bears the burden. The Opposition should table its own numbers: what it would tax, whom it would spare and what it would cut.

Only then will Sri Lanka's economic debate mature. The people the Opposition claims to speak for deserve substance, and it must lift its game to provide it. That means engaging, keeping the Government on its toes and offering a better alternative, not crying wolf at every turn and coming up short.