Sri Lanka’s left-wing National People’s Power (NPP) coalition secured historic electoral victories in 2024, winning both the presidency and a two-thirds parliamentary majority. But as the National People’s Power coalition settles into government, their anti-corruption platform and middle-class appeal have led to increasing compromises with the neoliberal order they once fought against.
In 2024, the National People’s Power (NPP) secured two electoral victories, marking a remarkable turning point in Sri Lanka’s political history. The NPP’s presidential candidate Anura Kumara Dissanayake secured 42% of the vote in the September elections and was elected as President. Immediately after coming to office, the President called for snap general elections, in which the NPP won the largest parliamentary majority in history, securing 159 seats, passing the critical two thirds mark needed for constitutional and other key reforms.
The NPP is a coalition of the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP), the only registered political party within it, and other trade union and civil groups, which formed in 2019. The NPP’s electoral performance in 2024 is significant for a few reasons. First, the JVP has been the third political force among the Sinhala electorate, polling generally between 3-5%. Second, it is the only political force with a history of armed insurgencies (1971 and 1987-89) to subsequently re-enter parliamentary politics in 1994, and go on to win state power through elections. Third, the NPP-JVP renews the negotiation of left politics that undergirds Sri Lanka’s political space in a context of an ongoing domestic economic crisis. In this article, we situate the NPP’s tenure in government within a framework of ideological politics.
Members and supporters of the NPP (pink-purple hat) and JVP (red hat) seen at the May Day Rally in Colombo. The JVP is the main political party within the NPP.
A trajectory towards the centre
The JVP, the main political party within the NPP, is a Marxist-Leninist party which intermittently formed coalition governments as a minority partner with the Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP), led by Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunge (1994-2004) and Mahinda Rajapaksa (2004-2007). In 2007, the JVP exited the Rajapaksa government, claiming ideological and political differences over the conduct of the war against the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), with a group of Sinhala Buddhist nationalist ideologues breaking away from the party and joining forces with Rajapaksa. Since then, the JVP-backed presidential candidates were fronted by the liberal United National Party (UNP) camp—former Army Commander Sarath Fonseka in 2010, and a common candidate fronted by the SLFP and UNP—Maithripala Sirisena in 2015. In 2010, a second major split occurred within the JVP, which expelled its more radical leftist core, which later became the Frontline Socialist Party (FSP).
The above trajectory reveals how the JVP shredded off its defining far-left politics and Sinhala Buddhist nationalism. Since 2019, the NPP is the latest and most (politically) successful attempt by the JVP to form a broad coalition which was able to appeal to the aspiring majority middle classes, winning an almost-near entirety of the electoral space. The NPP’s success occurs in a context where mainstream political parties are increasingly delegitimised, and satellite organisations of professionals and civil society (such as the NPP) provide alternative sources of credibility for political parties. The NPP’s successful fronting of a meritocratic assemblage of professionals and academics, reinforced its promise to fight corruption and clean the political system, which they rhetorically termed as a ‘shramadana’ (voluntary labour) to ‘clean up the parliament’.
A young boy pictured holding the sign “Nishpaadana aarthikayak, aarthika prajaathanthrawaadaya sahitha ratak” (A country with a manufacturing economy and economic democracy). These are key slogans in the NPP manifesto.
De-linking corruption from a global structural critique
The NPP’s strong rhetoric against corruption resonated highly with an angry electorate battered by the country’s bankruptcy in 2022. This anti-corruption rhetoric parallels the NPP’s meteoric rise to popularity and a dip in its structural critique of neoliberalism that typically characterises left politics. Towards the election, the NPP quickly revised its anti-IMF position to endorse the global financial institution, and promised to repatriate ‘stolen assets’ instead of offering a structural critique of international sovereign bonds (ISBs) or unregulated international capital flows. This electoral strategy of framing the problem as having a predominantly ‘national origin’, de-emphasised the party’s left identity, and made the party look more like a centre-left political outfit that Sri Lankan voters have found attractive since 1956.
A telling example of this was seen in the President’s quick shifting of positions regarding the proposed Adani wind power investment project in the Northwestern region. Before the election, Dissanayake vowed to cancel the project, but after coming to power, he committed to reviewing all projects related to connectivity with India. Since his inaugural visit to India in December 2024, the President stated that Sri Lanka will go ahead with the proposed project if environmental concerns regarding it were found to be acceptable. Dismissing concerns over the Adani Group being found corrupt in dealings in the US, he stated that his government is not concerned with Adani Group’s dealings with other countries, but is focused only on what the conglomerate does in Sri Lanka. This stance undermines the NPP’s anti-corruption mandate, and hyper focuses on corruption as a domestic issue and as a correctional fix to structural flaws of Sri Lanka’s economy.
The NPP’s electoral success owes itself to the popular mass protests (commonly known as the Aragalaya or struggle) of 2022 that emerged as the country was plunged into its history’s worst economic crisis. The protests culminated in the ousting of President Gotabaya Rajapaksa, and the Rajapaksa brand of left-nationalist politics at large. Subsequently, the parliament elected Ranil Wickremesinghe as president, who cleared the protest site by military force within a matter of days. However, the NPP, despite not playing a major role in the protests, quickly mobilised the anti-establishment popular sentiment into a successful political movement.
This embracing of the anti-establishment sentiment meant that the NPP became the vehicle of demands for anti-corruption and system change, which broadly comprised capitalist development and good governance aspirations. “These are aspirations associated with the middle class whose upward mobility relied on education and access to professional qualifications,” said Prabha Manuratne from the Department of English, University of Kelaniya, “this class had been seeking access to political power, as reflected in the formation of Viyathmaga (the professionals backing the Gotabaya Rajapaksa government) in 2019, and the post-Aragalaya expansion of the NPP”. The demand for a system change along these lines had manifested as a major campaign slogan in the 2015 and 2019 elections as well. Becoming the mouthpiece of the Aragalaya’s anti-establishment sentiment meant that the NPP’s rhetoric was cut to fit this sentiment, which also explains the quick shifts it made to the policies the JVP had stood for a long time.
NPP supporters resting after post-rally, eating ice cream. A placard next to them on the ground reads “Yuddaya nawathanu! Palasthina janathaawata jeewathweemata edadenu!” (End the war! Let the Palestinians have the right to live!). The JVP-NPP has maintained a pro-Palestinian stance.
The Aragalaya had embodied popular protests on the largest scale seen since independence, and was a loose, spontaneous grouping of people organised mainly through social media. As Vincent Bevin (2023, p.8) writes in If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution: “leaderless, ‘horizontally’ organised, ‘spontaneous,’ digitally coordinated mass protests in city streets or public squares” often end up reproducing the dominant ideologies of that society, instead of being revolutionary. In the absence of leadership of the Aragalaya by a political party, its dominant demands revived the past system change slogan and gave it an interpretation that was more mainstream.
The main implication of this is that it opened up the space for the NPP to move towards the centre on economic issues. The past Gotabaya government had withdrawn from the 16th IMF programme, when the government’s populist tax cuts violated its terms. The NPP, similar to the two other main political camps (NDF and SJB), was compelled to move towards the centre and support the implementation of the ongoing 17th IMF programme, completing the liberal consensus that characterises the current political space and moment.
On the national question (of Tamil rights and power sharing), there has been a notable receding of Sinhala Buddhist nationalist politics. Two electoral trends explain the NPP’s unprecedented success in winning the Tamil-majority Jaffna District, which no political party of Southern origin had been able to achieve before this. First, the main representative party of Tamil ideological politics—the Illankai Tamil Arasu Kachchi (ITAK)—suffered a setback due to political infighting. Second, the smaller Tamil political parties that depended on ‘Southern’ governments for cabinet positions were delegitimised by the NPP’s anti-establishment narrative in the North.
The victory of the NPP in the North running on a platform different to ITAK was significant in ushering in the possibility of a structural, class critique of ethnic relations. “The NPP’s victory opens up a greater political space for broader left politics, with a shift in the discourses dominating the liberal economy and constitutional approaches to the national question over the past four-and-half decades,” said Ahilan Kadirgamar, a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Sociology, University of Jaffna, adding, “It remains to be seen, however, how far the NPP can drive alternative politics, due to the economic constraints and whether the party will have the political will for decisive changes”.
An NPP rally in Colombo where their arts and culture policy was launched, in the lead up to the September 2024 elections.
Ideological positioning and floating signifiers
Since coming into power, the NPP has continued with most of the economic policies of the previous government. These include the continuation of the IMF-led economic stabilisation programme, despite its election promise to negotiate with the IMF based on an alternative Debt Sustainability Agreement (DSA) instead of the one that provided the baseline targets for the IMF bailout. However, in December 2024, the government finalised the debt restructuring process with private creditors, on the same terms which had been reached by the previous government. The president celebrated the entering into the deal echoing the language of the previous government that ‘There Is No Alternative’ to the IMF. This is despite the fact that Anura Kumara Dissanayake, as the leader of the JVP, presided at the party’s 2023 May Day rally articulating an anti-IMF platform.
So far, the NPP has deviated from the policy framework of the previous government only on two left-leaning overtures. First, the decision to not privatise key state-owned enterprises (SOEs), such as the loss-making Sri Lankan Airlines, and strategic industries such as the Ceylon Electricity Board and Ceylon Petroleum Corporation. Second, the President decided to delay the implementation of Parate execution. This meant that collaterals of defaulting small and medium enterprises (SMEs) would not be auctioned until the next review of the policy in March 2025.
The government’s current economic trajectory is reminiscent of the 1994 Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunge (CBK) government. The latter famously heralded leftist policies and gave the impression that it would reverse the economic liberalisation introduced since 1977. However, during the last phase of the 1994 campaign and once in government, it not only implemented but accelerated liberal economic policies, including privatisation of large SOEs. It would do so under the slogan ‘open economy with a humane face’. This came at a time of ideological convergence among the major political camps in Sri Lanka, in the form of a liberal consensus, and the decimation of the left by military and ideological means.
The formation of the SLFP-led Mahajana Eksath Peramuna government in 1956 was the first time that Sinhala Buddhist nationalism and left-leaning politics came together in capturing state power. Sri Lanka saw its strongest swing towards leftist policies under the 1970-77 SLFP-led coalition with two of the largest left parties, the Communist Party (CP) and Lanka Sama Samaja Party (LSSP). The latter two came to be known as the ‘old/traditional left’, compared to the ‘new left’ which comprised groups such as the JVP that pursued more revolutionary means to capture state power. The 1970-77 government faced a severe electoral defeat mainly due to the unpopularity it suffered over its insular economic policies, loss of land productivity due to accelerated land reforms, as well as loss of harvests caused by droughts, and the high cost of imports linked to the petroleum crisis in 1972.
These ‘traditional’ left parties never fully recovered from their electoral defeat to the hard-fisted rule of J. R. Jayawardena, who liberalised the economy, aggravated ethnic relations, and decimated opposition political parties and spaces. Thereafter, remnants of the LSSP and CP which survived the second JVP insurrection and government crackdowns, joined the SLFP-led governments of 1994 and 2004. Since 2015, the LSSP and CP have fragmented and supported the political enterprises of the SLFP-UNP, Samagi Jana Balawegaya (SJB) and also the NPP (to a smaller degree, however, mainly because of their ideological and political differences with the JVP).
By the 1990s, in the context of the ethnic conflict, the left critique had shifted more towards the issue of power sharing and ensuring ‘equality among ethnic groups’ than achieving equity based on a class critique. This shift was mirrored in the policies and rhetoric of the two main political camps, the SLFP and UNP, which reached a liberal consensus on the economy (liberal economy) and war (liberal peace).
Billboard on top of a house in Morakatiyara (a locality in the Southern coastal belt) reads “76 wasaraka saadaya hamaara karamu” (Let’s end the feast of 76 years), referring to the NPP campaign narrative of the elite capture of the political system since independence in 1948.
In the present too, the NPP has been quick to move towards a ‘liberal consensus’. On the question of whether the NPP has compromised on all the left ideals and values of the JVP within it, a cursory reading of what is politically ‘right’ or ‘left’, often expressed in terms of what floating signifiers such as ‘welfare/socialist’ or ‘neoliberal/capitalist’, takes away from a more structural, globally and historically situated reading of the government’s ideological project. The NPP’s ideological trajectory and politics can be better understood looking less at what ideology can be superimposed on politically expedient policies and key actors within the government, and instead by observing processes and politics: how the government’s approaches and framing of issues resonate with global and historical discourses, what such framings and proposed solutions de/legitimise, and how inclusively these decisions are made.
“In the left political enterprise, the NPP’s election is a significant achievement. In its journey towards accessing state power, the NPP compromised leftist ideals,” said Vidarshana Kannangara, a social activist based in Colombo, “in contrast, there are other further left political movements, such as the FSP, that manifest a left ideology but do not have a formidable programme to come to power. Instead, they depend on mechanisms such as People’s Councils, outside the political system, or in capitalising on crisis moments to form a government”.
Faced with the burden of pragmatic compromises, the politically savvy NPP-JVP leadership recognises the need to emphasise the alternative policies that would appease its left-leaning voter base. Some of the key markers of such an attempt are its attempt to join the BRICS, promote domestic industrialisation, and drive a strong cooperative movement. So far, Sri Lanka’s hurried application under the new government was rejected, but obtained membership of the BRICS New Development Bank (NDB).
Domestic industrialisation faces serious investment and capital constraints. While the government’s ambiguous policy on free trade agreements may hinder the chances of entering global value chains, it still has promise in agriculture and ICT, where local value addition is high. In the cooperative sector, the JVP has significant experience and potential to succeed in strengthening local economies and providing fair prices. However, their scalability to offer an alternative that counters the pressure mounted by increasingly neoliberal macroeconomic reforms are yet to be seen.
The NPP’s success in winning cooperative-level elections has suffered a setback since coming to power. These early signs of the pressures the new government faces have compelled it to pursue popular initiatives such as ‘Clean Sri Lanka’. This is a national-level project that provides a broad canvas to clean up the system, a watered-down version of the NPP’s campaign promise to deliver ‘system change’. The expectations of the aspirational middle class (who formed the critical electoral mass of the NPP’s victory), of consumption-driven growth and anti-corruption, are hard to satisfy given the straight-jacketed fiscal space that Sri Lanka is currently in, as resources to boost either consumption or production are low. The government’s populist approach has so far not been able to manoeuvre this narrow space to drive a left politics.
Campaign posters for an NPP Youth Rally with the slogan “Rata Anurata (The Country for Anura)”.
Remaining a people’s movement: Left politics and state power
The NPP presented itself successfully as a national movement which commanded a lot of appeal among the Tamil and Muslim minority communities. After almost three decades, a national political space emerged following the general election, as the NPP received support from both these communities, especially their youth. Since forming government, maintaining the popular momentum which creates a national space has proven to be a significant challenge: “The Muslim community feels that the NPP was hijacked by the JVP, with no Muslim representation within the cabinet and in the Presidential Task Force to ‘Clean Sri Lanka’,” said Najah Mohamed, founder leader of the Social Justice Party in Sri Lanka.
On the economic front, the NPP’s shift towards the centre has been evident. In the political realm, an analysis of the sites of power within the new government shows that the JVP forms the political core, while the NPP forms the outer core, ‘a popular front’, that leftist parties are known to establish to increase their electoral appeal. Since the parliamentary election, the NPP’s Secretary-General, Nihal Abeysinghe has assumed a lower profile than the JVP’s long-time General Secretary Tilvin Silva, who has stayed away from parliamentary politics. Abeysinghe, who is an elected member of Parliament, does not hold any ministerial portfolio.
The JVP’s insular nature, in terms of engaging with other political camps and the NPP itself, indicates how the JVP nucleus may attempt to dominate the broader NPP’s political trajectory. The JVP has a strong trade union presence, and these unions are observed to assert more control in the governance of state institutions, which in turn compromises the space for state reforms. This could translate to a rigid form of decision-making, that is less participatory and less inclusive. This exclusivist conduct derives from an ‘us versus them’ narrative, of a corrupt old establishment elite needing to be defeated by a morally intact core group.
This framing resonates with the ultimatum which former President Mahinda Rajapaksa posed at the end of the ethnic conflict in 2009, when he said that there were no longer ethnic minorities, but only patriots or traitors. Such subjugation of structural inter-ethnic grievances to a nation-building project is evident to some extent in the present, in different avatars. Further, the NPP economic policy’s seamless dovetailing with Ranil Wickremesinghe’s neoliberal economic agenda reproduces the same tropes that framed the economic crisis and the IMF-led bailout plan in highly technocratic terms, rendering them top-down and exclusive.
The NPP’s continuity with the policies of its neoliberal predecessor, discourages discourse on alternatives and portrays this continuity as pragmatic—‘the art of the possible’—a euphemism that seeks to render the problem technocratic and solutions clinical, decentering the relevance of ideological frameworks of ‘left’ and ‘right’ to a nondescript, post-political or post-ideological phenomenon. In some instances, when left political parties come to power, they tend to be highly insular and run a single narrative, merging the party with the state; some others foster a broader discourse and shared ownership of policy. For instance, Brazil’s centre-left governments under Lula da Silva are examples of the latter. The first scenario presents the threat of rendering social discourse apolitical, hollowing out institutions, and pushing the politics of dissent to the periphery. “Given that Sri Lanka is still in an economically fragile state, the NPP’s failures will create the space for a far-right, fascist government to come to power,” said Pubudu Jagoda, Education Secretary of the Frontline Socialist Party (FSP). Sri Lanka has a tradition of maverick democracy, and the NPP government’s resilience will be determined largely by its ability to foster shared ownership of governance.
Party supporters after an NPP rally holding the sign “Viduli-Telecom rakshana-Milco jaathika sampath wikuneema wahaa nawathanu!” (Halt immediately the sale of national assets such as electricity, telecommunication, Milco!). Milco is a state-owned dairy production and processing business.
Rajni Gamage and Harindra B Dassanayake
This article was originally published in Green Agenda on 20 January 2025
Images copyright © authors
