By Neville de Silva*
LONDON | 17 September 2025 (IDN) — Two years ago, in September, a comparatively little-known politician did what many of Sri Lanka’s 22 million people did not expect him to do. He won the country’s presidential election, rising from virtually nowhere.
Two months later, he made history. Leading his loosely knit alliance of essentially Marxist/socialist- leaning followers called National People’s Power (NPP), into facing the parliamentary election where he had been battered before. He did what no other political party had been able to achieve in democratic elections during the 75 years of independence of this Indian Ocean Island.
It was only natural that the new president, Anura Kumara Dissanayake (AKD), should capitalise on the unexpected presidential victory to take the next step in his political journey. In November that year, Dissanayake led his Marxist-leaning party to an unprecedented victory. His party won 159 of the seats in the 225-member legislature, sweeping away far more established parties and veteran politicians.
The Leftist NPP might never have reached the zenith of power had it not been for the mess in governance following the 2019 Easter Sunday terrorist bomb attacks by Islamic radicals. They blew up Catholic churches and luxury hotels in the capital Colombo, in seaside Batticaloa and elsewhere, killing some 270 persons, including children and tourists.
While the country was in fear and the government in disarray following the terrorist attacks coming after the military defeat in May 20O9 of the minority Tamil separatist LTTE in a nearly 30-year war, it was natural for people who had been living under war conditions for almost 30 years to fear the repeat of terrorist violence by another minority ethnic group.
With the date set for presidential elections as November 2019, six months after the Easter massacre, there was much relief among the majority Sinhala Buddhists, especially when Gotabaya Rajapaksa, younger brother of former President Mahinda Rajapaksa, who jointly led the war effort against the former Tamil LTTE, announced his intention to contest.
Gotabaya’s military history and claim that he will crush ethnic and religious violence and bring peace to the country got some solace to the Sinhala majority.
When the elections were held, Gotabaya Rajapaksa garnered over 52% of the vote, whereas Anura Kumara Dissanayake, an unexpected party candidate, was way back with a mere 3.2%. When parliamentary elections were held in August 2020, the Mahinda Rajapaksa-led Sri Lanka People’s Freedom Alliance won a massive 140-odd-seat victory.
Crisis, Protest, and a Power Vacuum
Anura Kumara Dissanayake’s NPP won a mere three seats in the 225-member legislature. Those two successive votes placed the NPP in the doghouse as far as the people’s perception of post-Easter Sunday Sri Lanka’s future went. Little wonder then, politicians and political activists looked at the NPP derisively, mocking the “three per cent” party.
But the shock was still to come. Shortly after Gotabaya Rajapaksa assumed the presidency, Sri Lanka, like most other countries, was struck by the COVID pandemic that caved in a country already suffering from the aftereffects of the Easter Sunday jihadist attack.
However, the Gotabaya Rajapaksa government, manoeuvrist in many ways and lacking experienced administrators, continued to fumble, running an administration that made supine assessments, even in areas such as agricultural development. They were instructing President Gotabaya on fertiliser use.
Antipathy for the then government of President Gotabaya Rajapaksa, a younger brother of former president Mahinda Rajapaksa, grew fast and mounted as thousands of ordinary people grappled with the poverty line as rising prices and fast depleting essential goods and domestic commodities hurt everyone, particularly the working class.
So, Sri Lanka was caught in more than a cleft stick — COVID on the one hand and a fast-collapsing economy on the other. Caught between them, a struggling population had little choice but to turn on an inexperienced administration, demanding its resignation before protesters sacked the president’s secretariat and official residence, among others.
The NPP found the situation ideal for a Leftist party to raise its slogans, as it had in previous years, and push its frontline members to the fore.
Eventually, President Gotabaya Rajapaksa fled the country secretly, but not before desperately seeking a temporary president to oversee the country’s affairs. At the same time, his brothers, Prime Minister Mahinda and Finance Minister Basil Rajapaksa, went into hiding at a naval base.
But before President Rajapaksa fled the island, he found a veteran politician to run the country as an interim president after parliament voted for him as the constitution permits it, for other leaders were undecided on accepting the role in such failing conditions.
Rajapaksa managed to persuade Ranil Wickremesinghe, a six-time Prime Minister and several-time Minister, a political enemy who had been voted out of parliament but was needed because other party leaders were hesitant to accept the temporary presidency.
It was an ideal situation for the NPP, as Wickremesinghe, a right-wing, pro-Western leader, was a sworn political enemy of the Leftist NPP. This was the first time in the country’s history that an entirely Leftist government ran the country.
From Ideals to Governance
But winning elections and running a country are two different things. In pro-election campaigns, Anura Kumara Dissanayake, popularly known as AKD, made such election promises that worried even some party supporters.
Perhaps the AKD-led party thought it would not be called to fulfil them. But as soon as the government was formed, the people, especially those of the NPP supporters, began calling on the government to keep its promises in earnest.
However, it is only when weighted by governance that AKD has come to understand the difficulty of fulfilling promises.
For instance, the promise made by AKD that he will not entertain the commitments that Ranil Wickremesinghe, as temporary president, made to the IMF for financial assistance to help the country through its economic crisis, especially loan repayments.
During the campaigns, AKD stated that he would not negotiate with Western institutions, such as the IMF. However, over time, the AKD’s promises have changed, and today it is heavily dependent on the IMF and other international institutions for rescue proposals.
Now, many of those glitzy promises made to win over supporters are slowly losing their glamour as hard times face the NPP and Donald Trump’s tariff changes begin to bite.
It would not be surprising if, over the next couple of years, there are perceptible shifts in Sri Lankan foreign policy, with the once Marxist-oriented NPP losing its leftist ardour and beginning to embrace Trump if he is still around and blowing his trumpet over how he will start running the world.
We have already seen that a generally pro-Chinese party that has paid obeisance to China has begun to change its tune, adopting Indian Prime Minister Modi’s offers to tie Sri Lanka closer to India, as it is called, while loosening its reliance on and friendship with China.
Foreign Policy Shifts and Internal Strains
But what is rather worrying is where Sri Lankan foreign policy is heading, especially the country’s long-standing diplomatic support for Palestine and the Palestinian people. As one of the founder members of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), dating back to the first Summit of 1961 in Belgrade under President Josip Broz Tito, Sri Lanka has stood by Palestine and its people.
But it seems the NPP government is losing its commitment to the Palestinian cause, possibly pressured by Trump and the US, for we see signs of foreign policy shifts. For a Leftist political party that twice launched insurrections against the Sri Lankan government in 1971 and 1987, the NPP’s path is bound to be interesting.
The NPP consists mainly of the Marxist Janata Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP), which led the 1971 armed attack against the government and now plays a leading role in the NPP. There are signs of differences rising between the two parties, though they seem contained at the moment.
How these frictions, including the tougher line that the JVP wishes to pursue, will be settled could determine how the NPP steers both foreign and domestic policy without sacrificing the country’s long-standing policies that previous administrations followed.
*Neville de Silva is a veteran Sri Lankan journalist who held senior roles in Hong Kong at The Standard and worked in London for Gemini News Service. He has been a correspondent for the foreign media, including the New York Times and Le Monde. More recently, he was Sri Lanka’s Deputy High Commissioner in London [IDN-InDepthNews]
Image source: Jurist, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0