Last week the JVP and the UNP both declared General Sarath Fonseka the common opposition candidate. However some loose ends still remain. One of the key conditions put forward by the UNP to accept Fonseka as the common candidate is the condition that the secretary of the outfit that Fonseka will be contesting under, will have to be a UNP nominee. (A possible candidate is the perennial favourite N.V.K.Weragoda.) Nobody yet knows what political outfit General Fonseka will be contesting under, except that he will not be giving nominations through either the UNP or the JVP.

Whatever the political party Fonseka chooses, Weragoda (or someone else nominated by the UNP), will have to be the general secretary of that outfit. The UNP insists on this condition because Gamini Dissanayake was assassinated in the middle of the 1994 presidential election campaign, and it was the general secretary of the party who sent Srima Dissanayake’s name to the elections commissioner. In this case, if something untoward were to happen, the UNP wishes to ensure that the notification sent to the elections commissioner will contain Wickremesinghe’s name and not that of Somawansa Amarasinghe!

Since such dangerous cogitations are floating around, the government must avoid doing anything stupid like reducing Sarath Fonseka’s security. He should be given whatever security he wishes to have (even if he keeps changing his requests from time to time) because if what is so cynically anticipated comes to pass, the government should be seen to be blameless. The JVP declared Fonseka their candidate as early as Monday but the UNP announced Fonseka as their candidate only on Thursday. The reason for the delay became apparent at the UNP working committee meeting on Thursday morning where chaos reigned with speaker after speaker berating the UNP leader for the sorry state he had brought the party to.

As The Island headline story reported on Friday, S.B.Dissanayake took Ranil to task telling him that he had brought the party to the sorry pass of not having a presidential candidate to field, and abandoning the elephant symbol and the green colour. He accused Ranil of not even being able to make Fonseka the UNP’s candidate and said that the UNP now has to go begging behind various ‘three wheeler’ parties.

Speaking further, SB also charged that Fonseka had been fielded as the UNP’s choice of common candidate not for him to win, as it is only Fonseka’s defeat that will ensure the survival of certain people. In order to thwart such treacherous schemes of using and then discarding Fonseka, SB called upon all UNPers to get together and work to ensure Fonseka’s victory. After this tumultuous working committee meeting, SB was getting into his vehicle when two or three journalists rushed up and asked him, "Where are you going? Aren’t you waiting for the press conference?" A surprised SB had asked "What press conference?" The journalists had said that there was a press conference organized in the hall at the back of the party headquarters and that about 150 media personnel were in attendance. SB had not been invited for the press conference, so he got into his vehicle and left.

SB has good reason to be resentful. The whole purpose of this pantomime of fielding a common candidate was to keep SB away from the presidential candidacy of the UNP. He was the next logical choice if Wickremesinghe was not going to contest. SB can galvanize the UNP vote base and also get as many minority votes as Wickremesinghe if not more. But if SB was given the candidacy, Wickremesinghe may well have lost control of the party – something that will not happen if a complete outsider contesting from a separate political party without the elephant symbol or the green colour is the UNP’s anointed candidate. In fact after the tumultuous working committee meeting where Fonseka’s candidacy was endorsed, Wickremesinghe looked relaxed and in control – he had just succeeded in sending someone else to the block and ensured his own survival as the head of the UNP until at least 2017. To use military jargon, the UNP leader made a tactical withdrawal and Sarath Fonseka is only a decoy to enable him to withdraw.

The very next day (Friday), the UNP general secretary Tissa Attanayake made a public statement to the effect that within one month of Fonseka’s election as president, the UNP and its allies will be presenting a bill to parliament to abolish the executive presidency and that they will be getting this bill passed within six months. Every time the UNP harps on this abolition of the executive presidency within six months, and their plan to present the relevant bill to parliament within one month of Fonseka’s victory, they undermine his election prospects. As SB said with such discernment, it is not to win that Fonseka has been fielded! Many are under the impression that with the end of last Thursday’s working committee meeting, the drama within the UNP is over but that is not so by a long shot. Only parliamentarians Johnston Fernando and Indika Bandaranayake and former Colombo Deputy Mayor Azath Sally said they would not campaign for the presidential election but many more are seething at the decision that has been made.

Almost everybody would have accepted Fonseka’s candidacy if he contested on the UNP ticket. In fact many would prefer Fonseka over Ranil because Fonseka has a track record of choosing the best available men for a job to be done and that is all that the UNP dissidents are asking for – a meritocracy without the promotion of incompetent favourites. However, the point is that many within the UNP don’t feel that Fonseka is that winning candidate. The odds against him are too just too great. There was a great deal of enthusiasm within the UNP in the north central province when Janaka Perera became the UNP’s chief ministerial candidate; but that awakening within the ranks of jaded UNPers, was not sufficient to take the UNP over the crest and many experienced people feel that things are going to be so in Fonseka’s case as well.

While there is no doubt much enthusiasm generated by Sarath Fonseka’s candidacy, this is mainly a case of UNP types sending e-mails and giving phone calls to other UNP types and those disgruntled with the Rajapaksa regime. This incestuous spike in enthusiasm can hardly be considered a general trend in the country. Of course the fact is that had Wickremesinghe been the UNP’s candidate, even this would have been absent. The feeling among many experienced and realistic UNPers that the odds are ranged against Fonseka is well founded. Consider the following:

1. Fonseka is up against the most popular president or head of government Sri Lanka has ever had. His popularity does not stem from only from the successful prosecution of the war. Mahinda Rajapaksa started his presidency with what has to be described as an unprecedented wave of popularity in 2005. Such was his popularity that it was he who overturned the established view that any candidate backed en masse by the minorities will win a presidential race. Having said that, it must be added that the LTTE prevented many Tamils from voting at that election. UNPers like to think they would have voted for Ranil. At the time Mahinda was elected president, the avowed policy of the UPFA government was to abide by the ceasefire agreement. It was the LTTE that forced the newly elected Rajapaksa government to go to war. Even with no war anywhere in sight, Mahinda won resoundingly in all Sinhala majority districts in 2005. The most important obstacle that Fonseka will have to face is this overwhelming and genuine popularity of the president. What can Fonseka do to bring down the president’s approval rating to below 50% in just two months?

2. Fonseka’s only claim to the presidency is based on the fact that he was the commander of the army that won the war against the LTTE. This would have been a very powerful factor in his favour if he was pitted against an opponent like Ranil Wickremesinghe who lends himself readily for labeling as an ``appeaser’’. Then it would have been a black and white situation as that which prevailed in 2005, and would have worked in Fonseka’s favour. But in this instance, Fonseka is pitted against none other than his own commander in chief, who has a much bigger share of the credit for the war victory than Fonseka himself. Fonseka was in fact only one of the three main actors in a drama directed by the presidential sibling Gotabhaya. This dilutes his claim to the credit for the war victory.

The funny thing is that while the opposition is acutely aware of the president’s personal popularity, which is why they hide at the mere mention of an election, they are blind to the fact that their new found saviour does not have a monopoly over the war victory and that his claims will be outdone by those of the government. It has to be realized that the UNP has not had an attractive presidential candidate since Gamini Dissanayake was assassinated fifteen years ago. To the charisma-starved UNP, Fonseka is a godsend - no less. It is this doggy-like enthusiasm of the broad mass of the UNP, that makes them blind to the glaring fact that while Fonseka certainly is an attractive candidate, his opponent has a bigger share of the credit for whatever Fonseka has been able to achieve.

3. Fonseka’s one and only claim to the presidency is the war victory while the government has several mega development projects as well. It should be remembered that the UNP government of 1977 had nothing but its development projects to recommend itself to the people and they lasted for seventeen years. The Rajapaksa government has not been quite as adept as the UNP government of 1977-1994 in marketing their development projects. If they had possessed the same propaganda skills of the Premadasas and the Gamini Dissanayakes, the present development projects alone would have been able to ensure the victory of the government even without any war victories. On all fronts, this has been by far, the most over-achieving government in post independence history – which is why the opposition has no candidate of their own to field against the president except a recently retired soldier who served that same government.

4. The LTTE was in some senses a relatively easy target. The Sri Lankan government always had more firepower and more men than the LTTE. What the government lacked was the political will to finish the LTTE off. When the political will manifested itself, the LTTE was as good as dead. So in the battle against the LTTE, Fonseka was fighting against an enemy who was out manned and out gunned from the very beginning. But now, in the present battle that Fonseka finds himself in, he is out gunned and out manned from the start. If Fonseka, with nothing but the force of his personality, can prevail against the devastating charisma of the president, the patriotic credentials of the UPFA government and the spinoffs from their development projects, then this will be his real victory and he would have outdone himself. If he is hailed now as one of the military men who finished off the world’s deadliest terrorist outfit, a single handed victory against the Rajapaksa government will elevate him to the level of a political phenomenon unseen anywhere else in the democratic world!

5. President Rajapaksa has a single political entity to back him, whereas Fonseka’s side is composed of mutually antagonistic forces who have come together only for the opportunistic purpose of palming off their political responsibilities on Fonseka. Beyond this point, their interests diverge. Last week, even as Fonseka was endorsed as the common candidate, the JVP and UNP were pulling in different directions on the appointment of a prime minister in the event of a Fonseka victory.

There was an interesting development on Tuesday, when party leader Ranil Wickremesinghe had told Tissa Attanayake, Karu Jayasuriya and Ravi Karunanayake that sections of the media were trying to create splits within the joint opposition by making out that there was a conflict over the premiership. Wickremesinghe averred that he was not interested in the premiership in the event of Fonseka’s victory. This statement was given out to all the political columns. This is the surest indication yet that Wickremesinghe is not expecting Fonseka to win.

6. Among those backing Fonseka, it’s the JVP that has the cadres and the discipline to be able to run a good election campaign; but it’s the UNP that has the votes. The JVP voter is not patronage conscious, but the UNP voter is. In fact the fate of the short lived UNP government of 2001-2004 showed very clearly that if patronage was not forthcoming, the average UNPer would not consider even a UNP government to be his government. The domination of Fonseka’s election campaign from the beginning by the JVP will seriously impair his ability to exploit the UNP vote bank fully.

The village level UNPer votes for a candidate only if he is positioned to receive patronage from that candidate. Even local village level candidates will get votes only to the extent that he is seen to command the patronage of those above him. Thus, anybody seen to have the ear of the source of patronage gets the UNP vote.

Within the SLFP however, the situation is different. Stooges of the leader don’t necessarily come on top as we saw even at the recently concluded SPC elections because the SLFP which is a party of protest is not as half as patronage conscious as the average UNPer. For the patronage conscious UNP voter, the present election presents an unusual situation. Even if Fonseka wins, there is no guarantee that he will funnel patronage in the UNP’s direction. Even if he does, the village level voter does not know whether his proximate leader at the village level will be one of those with access to such patronage. Given the fact that Fonseka is a complete outsider, there will always be the suspicion that patronage will be directed elsewhere.

7. There is the expectation that if the Tamil National Alliance and the various Tamil Diaspora organizations overseas asks Tamil voters to vote for Sarath Fonseka, they will do so in order to wreak vengeance on the Rajapaksa government and that this Tamil vote would play a pivotal role in a Fonseka victory. However the problem is that the TNA campaigned assiduously at the recent Jaffna Municipal Council elections and went from house to house within the municipal area and asked the people to vote for them. Despite all their efforts, less than half the voters of Jaffna present in the town at that time actually went to vote. If the TNA was unable to persuade Jaffna Tamils to vote for fellow Tamils born and bred in Jaffna, how successful will they be in persuading the Tamils to vote for a Sinhalese candidate in far away Colombo? The assumption that most people have is that the Tamils hate the Rajapakse government for having finished off the LTTE. If that is the case, at least a part of that hatred would attach to Fonseka as well even though he may now have switched sides.

8. For a bid for power like that of Fonseka’s to succeed, there should be a great deal of resentment built up in the country against the incumbent president. It’s only then that people will be motivated to vote in such numbers as to make a difference in the final outcome. However, there is hardly any resentment in society against the president. Even UNPers have no reason to hate the president. And indeed it’s this very lack of tension that has enabled so many die-hard UNPers to switch sides without a second thought in recent times. How is Fonseka to turn a benign and popular president into an unpopular president within two months? It is difficult to defeat even an unpopular president and Fonseka is taking on a president at the height of his popularity.

9. The SLFP has since its inception been a party of protest. Their election campaigns have always been based on hatred of the establishment and in order to bring someone down they would enter into no-contest pacts with other opposition parties and even contest under different symbols at elections. Even in 1956, the SLFP did not contest under the hand symbol but under the Wheel symbol of the Mahajana Eksath Peramuna. So not contesting under the party symbol or the party colour is a well established practice in the SLFP.

The UNP in contrast, has been the establishment party. It was against the UNP that the SLFP organized joint opposition showdowns. The roles now seem to be reversed. Be that as it may, the elephant symbol and the green colour of the UNP has been a permanent feature of all elections in this country from the time of independence. This is the first election that will not feature the elephant symbol. At the working committee meeting held last Thursday, S.B.Dissanayake had pointed out this fact and said that it was Wickremesinghe who had brought the party to this sorry state.

At the press conference held immediately after the working committee meeting, Wickremesinghe tried to gloss over this unpleasant fact by describing the presidential election as a ‘referendum’ and trying to draw parallels with the referendum of 1982, where there were no party symbols but only the lamp and the pot signifying ‘yes’ and ‘no’ respectively. This spin however is not going to fool anybody. The referendum of 1982 was to obtain an answer to a question as to whether the life of parliament was to be extended or not. But this presidential election is for the purpose of appointing the executive president of the country and at this election, there’ll be no elephant symbol or green colour visible

10. Fonseka will be almost completely dependent on the JVP for the election campaign. Usually at presidential elections, the UNP candidate works through the party organization with the candidate distributing money to electoral organizers for the campaign. This time, with a parliamentary election in the offing, Fonseka will not be able to use the UNP electoral organizers to carry out even a part of his campaign, because much of the money he gives the UNP organizers will disappear into their own kitty to finance the parliamentary election campaign. That would have happened even to a UNP candidate. This time when the candidate is outside the UNP, one can expect this tendency to be redoubled. To the extent that Fonseka is surrounded by JVPers and other unfamiliar individuals, that will alienate the UNP voters and the organizers even more.

11. Up to the day of the presidential election, Fonseka has less than two months to travel all over the country and address UNPers. JVPers vote on command but UNPers don’t. Had Fonseka been the leader of the UNP, he would have no need to introduce himself to the UNP regional leaders much less the rank and file. But since he is a complete outsider, he will have to establish a personal rapport with the UNP regional leaders. The fact is that the average UNP voter does not give a damn as to what you may have done for the country. He is more interested in knowing what you would do for him. It is doubtful whether Fonseka would be able to visit the electorates within the short time left to him. This will be a rushed election campaign with minimal personal rapport between the candidate and the constituency.