Guest Speaker: Harini Amarasuriya, Prime Minister of Sri Lanka

On 31 March, Dr. Harini Amarasuriya, Prime Minister of Sri Lanka was invited at Sciences Po by the Paris School of International Affairs (PSIA) and the South Asia Programme.

The Prime Minister engaged in a conversation with Christophe Jaffrelot, Scientific Director of the South Asia Programme and Research Director at the Center for International Studies (CERI), before responding to questions from the audience.

A Newly Elected Prime Minister Committed to Her Country

Dr. Harini Amarasuriya was sworn in as the 17th Prime Minister of the Democratic Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka on 18 November 2024. She is also the Minister of Education, Higher Education and Vocational Education.

Dr. Harini Amarasuriya's multifaceted career spans academia, social activism and grassroots politics, with a focus on youth issues, human rights and social development. For the past decade, she worked as a Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the Open University of Sri Lanka. As a researcher, she has published treatises on elite politics, dissent, social justice, discrimination and youth, female-headed families, and child labour. In 2016, she was also a member of the People’s Representative Committee on Constitutional Reforms of Sri Lanka.

In 2011, she wrote her PhD thesis on child protection in Sri Lanka and received PhDs in Social Anthropology and International Health and Development from the University of Edinburgh and Queen Margaret University (both in Scotland). She has also sat on several boards related to community health, women's research, and legal advocacy.

The Sri-Lankan Exception: A Unique Re-Democratisation Process in South Asia

An overview of the political situation in Sri Lanka by Eric P. Meyer, Emeritus professor at Inalco, Paris, author of Sri Lanka, Biography of an Island, between local and global, Colombo, Viator,
2006. This is a shortened version of the article, available on the South Asia Programme website.

The overwhelming success of the National Peoples Power (NPP) in the Sri Lankan legislative elections of 14 November 2024 (more than two thirds of seats, 61.5% of the vote) confirmed the popularity of President Anura Kumara Dissanayake, elected on 21 September with 42.3% of the vote (55.9% after counting the preferential votes that serve as a second round), and of the team he put in place headed by Prime Minister Harini Amarasuriya. This success contrasts with the 3 to 4% of the vote obtained by Dissanayake in 2019 and by his party in 2020.

Beyond a simple rejection of discredited outgoing parliamentarians, how can such a meteoric rise be explained? And how was the democratic process not derailed in Sri Lanka, in spite of the succession of shocks which affected the country since independence – insurgencies of 1971 and 1987-1989, separatist war from the early 1980s to 2009, economic and political crisis of the early 2020s?

Sri Lanka recent electoral history:

• The Aragalaya popular movement of 2022 (Sri Lanka's “Arab spring") – sparked by the economic crisis, Covid, corruption, and the dominance of the Rajapakse clan – led to the resignation of President Gotabhaya Rajapakse;
• Interim President Ranil Wickremesinghe pulled the country out of bankruptcy through a deal with the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The resulting austerity measures benefitted to the rise of the NPP;
• The current President Dissanayake made a smart move when creating the NPP in 2019, rallying the Sinhalese popular masses and leaving the People’s Liberation Front (JVP) towards a democratic direction;
• The 2024 elections demonstrated the resilience of the democratic system. With 67% participation, an electoral campaign without major incidents, and the smooth functioning of a complex proportional list ballot with preferential ranking of candidates;
• The NPP seems to be successfully turning the page on the civil war that ended in 2009 with the defeat of the Tamil separatists for which the Rajapakse brothers took credit, building their power on the instrumentalisation of tensions between the Buddhist Sinhalese majority and the Tamil-speaking Hindu, Muslim and Christian minorities.

The NPP, goals and challenges:

• The NPP aims for a “clean” political culture through practical measures aiming at reducing poverty, banning communal politics, dynamising the administration, and ensuring the impartiality of justice;
• The party must try to renegotiate the agreements with the IMF to alleviate the poverty of the masses, fight against corruption and mafia practices, monitor the change in political culture, strengthen coexistence between communities internally, and remove the mistrust of the Sri Lankan Tamil diaspora;
• From a geopolitical perspective, the country needs to keep an equal distance between India and China. The former Rajapaksa regime, while pretending to defend Sri Lanka’s independence and unity, had mortgaged the island to Chinese economic-strategic interests. President Dissanayake's realist line is already confronted to five major projects which are under review and represent an economic and sovereignty dilemma:  two linked to China – the “Colombo port-city” and Hambantota port – and three linked to India – the natural harbor of Trincomalee, the wind turbines in Mannar and Pooneryn, and the extension of the Colombo port container terminal.