By Kusum Wijetilleke
Sri Lanka’s National People’s Power (NPP) Government has reopened the constitutional question with a familiar project to abolish the Executive Presidency (EP) through a new constitution.
Prime Minister Harini Amarasuriya has stated in Parliament that abolition cannot be done without a new constitution, that prior reform proposals are being studied, and that the draft will go to public discussion and ultimately a referendum.
At first glance, the case appears straightforward. The EP, born under J.R. Jayewardene’s 1978 constitutional project, concentrated Executive power to an extent that has repeatedly hollowed out the rest of the State.
Even where presidents were popular and successful, for example, Ranasinghe Premadasa’s developmental ambitions and Mahinda Rajapaksa’s wartime consolidation, the office functioned as a machine for personalisation, patronage, and institutional subordination. Where presidents were unpopular, in the case of Maithripala Sirisena’s internal chaos and Gotabaya Rajapaksa’s policy lunacy, the same institutional design translated into paralysis, impunity, and the rapid collapse of Government legitimacy and financial credibility.
Yet the abolition debate now lands in a deeply uncomfortable context: a Parliament that appears structurally incapable of independent scrutiny, even on matters that cut directly against the electoral promises on which the NPP rose to power. If Sri Lanka abolishes the EP without simultaneously building a legislature that can credibly govern and check power, the reform risks becoming a constitutional reshuffle that preserves the same dominance – only relocating it from a single executive figure to a party ‘high command’ operating through the Cabinet, the Treasury, and a whipped majority.
This is the paradox: how do you justify abolishing an overbearing presidency when the alternative institution, Parliament, is already reduced to a party vessel?
Follow the leader
The strongest arguments for abolishing the EP are not moral; they are institutional. Asanga Welikala’s work emphasises that Sri Lankan presidentialism produces a governance culture in which power is concentrated and personalised, while checks and balances remain weak. In this design, the State learns to ‘trust the leader’ rather than enforce accountability through transparent decision-making and robust institutions.
In theory, a directly elected president with a fixed term can provide stability, policy continuity, and the ability to push through reforms against veto players. In practice, Sri Lanka’s presidency has repeatedly demonstrated the darker side of that logic: the office becomes the primary node of patronage, it dominates appointments, weakens independent commissions, blurs the boundary between party and State, and invites the politics of strongman salvation.
Welikala also notes the ethnic dimension: Presidential Elections can incentivise majoritarian mobilisation rather than cross-communal bargaining, undermining minority confidence rather than building a ‘national’ mandate. The arguments are doubtless persuasive, but abolishing the EP is not the same as building democracy. It can just as easily produce a different form of dominance: cabinet government without cabinet accountability.
Parliamentary independence
The pro-abolition argument often smuggles in an unstated premise – that a parliamentary system automatically creates accountability because a prime minister depends on the confidence of Parliament. But this only works where Parliament is meaningfully autonomous, where Members of Parliament (MPs) can scrutinise their own government, where committees have teeth, where the governing party tolerates dissent, and where Executive power cannot easily discipline lawmakers through patronage, nominations, or career threats.
Sri Lanka does not currently resemble that model. On some of the biggest ‘U-turns,’ especially economic policy alignment and the distributional burden of the International Monetary Fund (IMF)-era settlement, public parliamentary dissent from a large governing majority has been non-existent. This is not merely a matter of personalities; it is the structure of party power in a system where MPs often function as vote banks for the Executive line, rather than as representatives holding a governing coalition to account. The critique becomes more relevant when placed against Sri Lanka’s lived distributional reality since the crisis.
The NPP’s rise was powered by an anti-elite, ‘system change’ promise: reduce corruption, restore fairness, and ease the crushing burden on ordinary people. But Sri Lanka remains under a tight fiscal and external constraint environment shaped by debt restructuring and the IMF programme, conditions that, by design, push governments towards revenue extraction, price reforms, and restraint in spending.
The social pressure point is not abstract. The World Bank estimated Sri Lanka’s poverty rate at 25% in 2024, warning that poverty would remain elevated even as macro indicators stabilised. Energy pricing has been a particularly visible flashpoint: multiple analyses and reporting in 2024 described Sri Lanka’s household electricity tariffs as the highest in South Asia, with households paying multiples of regional comparators. While tariffs have been revised up and down since then, the regulatory record itself shows repeated and politically fraught revisions, underscoring how central energy pricing has become to the political economy of austerity.
On the tax side, the grievance is not simply that ‘taxes are high.’ It is that the burden is experienced as regressive in effect: heavy reliance on broad consumption taxation (especially Value-Added Tax) and payroll burdens alongside a tax base that still struggles to credibly capture wealth, rents, and high-end avoidance. Commentaries in Sri Lankan media have increasingly framed this as a legitimacy problem: narrow income tax incidence and heavy dependence on indirect taxes.
Then comes the symbolic rupture: the spectacle of luxury accumulation amid mass strain. Media recently reported a tax controversy linked to Dudley Sirisena’s Rolls-Royce, which, whatever the exact compliance facts, landed in public consciousness as a vivid representation of unequal burden and elite insulation. In a country where poverty has surged and the crisis narrative remains raw, these symbols do political damage because they imply that sacrifice is being administered downward while privilege floats in the opposite direction.
This is precisely where parliamentary independence matters. In a functioning parliamentary democracy, such contradictions become the fuel for backbench revolts, committee inquiries, dissenting speeches, and legislative bargaining. When that does not happen, when a large majority appears politically silent on the central distributive questions, citizens draw a rational conclusion: Parliament is not where decisions are made, nor is it where the citizenry is represented.
Governance drift
The question is not only economic. It is also about institutions that audit and restrain power. Recent reporting and civil society statements have highlighted a prolonged and contentious deadlock over appointing a permanent auditor general after the retirement of the prior officeholder in April 2025, including repeated rejections of presidential nominations by the Constitutional Council.
A national newspaper column has framed this as part of a broader anxiety: commissions and oversight mechanisms designed to ensure good governance become vulnerable to political manoeuvre when the Executive (or ruling party) treats independent offices as obstacles.
Transparency International Sri Lanka has warned that the absence of a permanent auditor general weakens the entire accountability chain at precisely the moment Sri Lanka must manage emergency spending and reconstruction pressures. The point here is not to litigate personalities; it is to show that constitutional design is meaningless if the political class does not internalise the norm that some institutions must remain genuinely insulated from partisan capture.
This institutional drift also collides with the NPP’s own ‘system change’ branding. International observers assessing the NPP’s first year have noted an uneven picture: anti-corruption energy and legitimacy on one side, and persistent economic strain and reform constraints on the other. The danger is that constitutional reform becomes a theatre, big structural promises masking the continued reality of concentrated decision-making.
‘De-presidentialisation’
So what is the real rationale for abolishing the EP in a context of weak parliamentary independence? It cannot be naïveté, that ‘a prime minister and Parliament will automatically be better.’ Sri Lanka’s lived experience suggests otherwise.
The justification must be reframed more honestly. Either the project is one of de-presidentialisation, to remove the single office that most easily concentrates patronage and coercive appointment power, and that most easily becomes an engine for a cult of personality. Or else, the option is re-parliamentarisation: rebuilding Parliament so that it can actually do the job abolition presumes it will do: scrutinise budgets, challenge policy ‘U-turns,’ protect independent institutions, and reflect the plural interests of the electorate.
Abolition without re-parliamentarisation is not reform; it is displacement. In practical terms, that means the constitutional debate cannot remain stuck at the headline, ‘abolish the EP’; it must answer the harder design questions:
- How do you protect committee systems from party whips and Executive retaliation?
- How do you strengthen Committee on Public Enterprises (COPE)/Committee on Public Accounts (COPA)-style oversight so it is not performative?
- How do you secure truly independent appointments for audit, prosecutions, Police, and the public service, so that a parliamentary system doesn’t simply recreate Executive dominance through partisan capture?
- How do you change incentives so MPs can survive politically while dissenting on policy substance?
Unless those questions are integrated into the reform package, the abolition argument collapses into a credibility trap: you remove the presidency, but the same concentration remains, now exercised through Cabinet and party control of Parliament.
The constitutional debate has two gravitational centres: abolishing the EP and addressing the national question/13th Amendment. This is politically inevitable. But it creates a sequencing risk: if constitutional reform becomes overloaded, with Executive restructuring, devolution, electoral reform, and rights protections, Sri Lanka can repeat the pattern of grand drafts and failed consensus. The question is not “should we abolish the executive presidency?” but what institutional architecture will prevent Sri Lanka from simply replacing one concentrated centre of power with another while sustaining Parliament as purely performative.
If the NPP’s constitutional project is to be more than symbolism, it must be judged not by whether the presidency is abolished on paper, but by whether the reform produces the conditions that are missing: visible parliamentary dissent when promises are broken, credible oversight when money is spent, and independent institutions that cannot be casually politicised.
(The writer is a political commentator, media presenter, and foreign affairs analyst. He serves as Adviser on Political Economy to the Leader of the Opposition and is a member of the Working Committee of the Samagi Jana Balawegaya [SJB]. A former banker, he spent 11 years in the industry in Colombo and Dubai, including nine years in corporate finance at DFCC Bank, where he worked closely with some of Sri Lanka’s largest corporates on project finance, trade facilities, and working capital. He holds a Master’s in International Relations from the University of Colombo and a Bachelor’s in Accounting and Finance from the University of Kent [UK]. He can be contacted via email: [email protected] and X: @kusumw)
Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the writer and do not necessarily reflect the official position of this publication.
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