Sri Lanka’s post-war local elections: Voting in the empty Tigers’ lair – The Economist

Elections reveal a country still divided

CAS931 AFTER a resounding military victory over the Tamil Tigers, Mahinda Rajapaksa, Sri Lanka’s president, must have hoped for triumph in the first post-war polls in the scarred north. In the event, low turnout and the unexpected success of a pro-Tiger party jolted the government in the elections on August 8th to the Jaffna municipal and Vavuniya urban councils.

Turnout was 22% in Jaffna (of an unrealistically inflated register) and 52% in Vavuniya. The ruling coalition led by the United People’s Freedom Alliance (UPFA) won 13 out of 23 seats on the Jaffna council. But the pro-Tiger Tamil National Alliance (TNA) came second with eight. The UPFA was led by a government minister, Douglas Devananda, whose campaign was well financed.

In Vavuniya, where nearly 300,000 people displaced by the war still languish in government-run camps, the UPFA won just two of 11 seats. The TNA secured five, and will be able to run the council in coalition with the Sri Lanka Muslim Congress, which won one seat.

This is not the outcome the government foresaw when it rejected calls to postpone elections to allow the north time for physical and emotional recovery. The TNA used to be a proxy for the Tigers and took orders from its leader, Velupillai Prabhakaran, who was killed by the army in May. The party was widely thought defunct after the Tigers’ rout. Some see its strong performance as a sign of growing anger among northern Tamils at the government’s failure to normalise their lives after 30 years of conflict. Initial promises of a political package that would resolve longstanding grievances have fallen by the wayside, having been pushed aside until after a presidential election in 2010.

Somapala Gunadheera, a retired civil servant, said the elections show that the annihilation of the Tigers has not achieved the government’s main aim, the building of a united Sri Lanka. Indeed, in Jaffna, TNA leaflets claimed that to vote for the ruling coalition would be to subject the peninsula to rule by Sri Lanka’s mainly-Buddhist Sinhala majority.

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