Next week we’re delighted to welcome the Prime Minister of Sri Lanka, Dr Harini Amarasuriya, to mark the 60th anniversary of IDS.
Sri Lanka offers a positive story about democratic renewal, which in these times of democratic backsliding, offers valuable lessons for other countries.
In recent months IDS has been reflecting on the importance of better engaging people with democratic systems, to help combat democratic backsliding. But in Sri Lanka, I argue, the success tells us something about the nature of political parties.
Event: In conversation with the Prime Minister of Sri Lanka
Sustained popular protests ousted corrupt and ineffective governments across South Asia: in Sri Lanka in July 2022, in Bangladesh in July 2024, and in Nepal in September 2025. So far, so good. The political follow-up to these initial successes, however, has been variable.
A major reason for that variation is the extent to which the energy underlying the protests was incorporated into coherent, organised political parties. The student groups that played the leading role in the Bangladesh protests failed to do that effectively. When general elections were held in February 2026, the new student-led National Citizens Party took just six parliamentary seats. By contrast, capitalising on the fact that it had not been in power since 2006, the old and in many ways discredited Bangladesh National Party won almost two thirds of seats.
The situation in Nepal is more hopeful. Having just six months to organise between the overthrow of the old government in September 2025 and the elections of March 2026, the protesters opportunistically but sensibly flooded into the two-year old Rashtriya Swatantra Party (RSP). The RSP had been formed by a popular former TV presenter, and already had a nationwide organisation. The RSP won almost two thirds of seats, and Balen Shah, the de facto leader of the 2025 protests, became Prime Minister. We do not yet know whether the new government will prove stable and able to implement much of its policy programme. At the very least it is clear that the RSP is responsible and electorally accountable for what happens next.
The Sri Lanka situation is much more positive. In Presidential and Parliamentary elections in September and November 2024, a ‘revised’ political party, the National People’s Power (NPP), won first the executive presidency and then more than two-thirds of parliamentary seats. Since that time, the NPP has governed in ways that are commendable considering the challenges it has faced, including very heavy debts resulting from a major economic crisis in 2022.
The government has stuck to a pre-agreed (but controversial) IMF programme, begun to re-pay significant amounts of debt, and almost doubled the proportion of GNP collected in taxes. It is still very popular. This is partly because it has made conspicuous efforts to deliver on its election promises: to root out and punish rampant corruption; respect professionalism and technical expertise in public sector appointments; and take a low key approach to ‘hot-button’ issues around ethnic and religious rivalry and conflict.
The NPP is revised rather than new nor old, because it is the result of the coalescence of two distinct components. The dominant component is the JVP (People’s Liberation Front). The JVP is an avowedly Marxist organisation dating from the late 1960s that launched its first armed insurrection to overthrow the state in 1971 and another in 1987-9. After 1989, the party became predominantly committed to the electoral path, while remaining a tightly organised cadre-based party, and without entirely giving up on the Marxian language about capturing state power.
The second component of the NPP is a set of 21 small and diverse civil society groups that joined with the JVP in 2019. The JVP, like all previous Sri Lankan political parties, was – and is – heavily male dominated. Women, including veterans of the women’s movement, were more prominent in the newly recruited organisations.
There is a web of interacting factors that explain why the NPP is able to govern effectively:
Separation between government and party
There is a degree of separation between the government and the dominant JVP. Five of the six men in the JVP Politburo, including the President, have ministerial posts. But they do not necessarily control the most powerful ministries. The JVP Secretary-General, who holds no ministerial position, is arguably as powerful as the President. The party plays an active role in policymaking, and is especially focused on long term goals of socio-economic transformation. There is no NPP organisational apparatus independent of the JVP.
Policymaking has not become overly politicised
The political dominance of the JVP has not led to a high degree of politicisation of the government apparatus or the details of policymaking. Those were the characteristics of previous governments to which the NPP is strongly opposed. Professional competence plays a major role in public service appointments. Some powerful Ministers, especially in the economic policy area, are not senior in the JVP hierarchy, or even JVP members.
The NPP has been able to build electoral trust
Although not electorally popular until the 2022 economic crisis exposed the incompetence – and well as the gross corruption – of the old regime and the old political elite, the JVP were able to build on their reputation for honesty, frugality and political commitment to build a powerful NPP political brand. Its major components are personal and organisational probity, anti-corruption, professionalism (as against political connection) and total rupture with old regime parties and politicians. In a political system long dominated by elite families, the NPP leaders stand out as middle class. Partly because the NPP has refused to do deals of any kind with politicians from other parties, voters can have a degree of trust that the NPP will try to do what it promises. This is a major change from recent decades, when political parties lost permanency and coherence, and many politicians swopped parties at the drop of a hat.
Coherence within the political party
By contrast, the JVP/NPP has been building corporate coherence and trustworthiness through a series of measures that (a) protect the party against damaging behaviour on the part of its members holding elected posts (through dismissal from the post and/or the party) (b) bind members closer to the party (abolishing MPs pensions, reducing their allowances and requiring all holders of elected posts to pass their salaries to the party for redistribution) and (c) reducing the potential corrosive influence of external money on the party by centralising fund-raising.
Because of its Communist echoes and antecedents, a political party with this high degree of corporate coherence is suspect in the eyes of conventional liberal democrats. But conventional, more pluralistic political parties may not be the best instruments to protect nascent processes of re-democratisation.
There are many ‘old regime’ politicians in Sri Lanka who are out of power but have access to large amounts of (corrupt) money that could be used to subvert the NPP. Further, in environments where politicians are at very much at risk of being subverted by corrupt money and private business interests, the most effective democratic political parties may be those that, like the JVP/NPP, place a strong emphasis on corporate coherence and organisational discipline.
