“Don’t worry, I will control the situation”, former president Ranil Wickremesinghe told reporters and supporters as he arrived at court in a van stuffed full of lawyers and legal aides on 22 August. Hours later, local news was flooded with photographs of Wickremesinghe in handcuffs, being escorted by uniformed police officers, and of his silhouette behind the grills of a prison bus.

This marks the first time a former president has been arrested since Sri Lanka introduced the office of the executive president in 1978. Wickremesinghe is being charged with misuse of public funds during his short stint in the president’s office from 2022 to 2024. It is alleged that during an official visit to London in 2023, Wickremesinghe used public funds to attend his wife’s graduation ceremony – allegations that he denies.

Wickremesinghe is no ordinary former president – he is a six-time prime minister who has failed to win every presidential election he has contested (in 1999, 2005, and 2024). His long-standing ambitions for the presidency only came to fruition in 2022, when he was able to bypass elections and was nominated to the office by parliament following the resignation of President Gotabaya Rajapaksa in the wake of the aragalaya (Sinhalese for “struggle”) protest movement.

Despite his poor electoral track record, Wickremesinghe maintains an iron grip on his party, the UNP – a center-right formation representing landed and trading interests that was also the first party to govern Sri Lanka after independence in 1948. The UNP’s deputy leader is Wickremesinghe’s cousin, Ruwan Wijewardena, whose family owns one of the largest media houses in Sri Lanka.

Who is Ranil Wickremesinghe?

Wickremesinghe – a member of the Mont Pelerin Society founded by Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek – is often viewed as the Sri Lankan avatar of neoliberalism.

He is the nephew of J.R. Jayawardena, a leading figure in Sri Lanka’s independence movement who later served as the country’s first Minister of Finance (his austerity policies of withdrawing food subsidies and hiking public transport fees led to the Great Hartal of 1953). Jayawardena became prime minister in 1977 and created the powerful office of the executive president (which he occupied from 1978 to 1989 and used to crush the left and usher in neoliberal reforms).

Wickremesinghe entered politics under Jayawardene’s wing. In 1981, as Minister of Education, he authored a controversial white paper to reform the country’s free education system. This white paper was one of many catalysts leading to student unrest that fed into a youth uprising in the late 1980s. During these uprisings, Wickremesinghe, this time as Minister of Industries, was accused of running a sadistic torture camp in a housing complex in Batalanda in the Gampaha district north of Colombo. A 1998 presidential commission of inquiry recommended legal action be taken against Wickremesinghe, though this has yet to happen.

Wickremesinghe has played a key role in Sri Lanka’s recent economic crises. While serving as premier from 2015 to 2019, his government suspended Chinese investments, withdrew agricultural subsidies, took Sri Lanka to the IMF, and increased the foreign debt stock by 42% (mainly by borrowing at high interest from private bond markets). Within days of his premiership, his appointee for the governorship of the Central Bank, school friend Arjuna Mahendran, was involved in a bond scam that lost the government at least USD 11 million (there is a warrant out for Mahendran’s arrest, but he is safe in Singapore).

By the time Wickremesinghe came back to power through the back door in 2022, the country had defaulted on its external debts – the high interest payments owed to private creditors being one of the major causes of the default. Wickremesinghe used the opportunity to impose a harsh austerity programme, jacking up electricity bills by 264%. He also oversaw rushed debt-restructuring negotiations that were concluded just days before the last presidential election (which he lost).

If Wickremesinghe has one skill, it is to leave governments that follow him with a ticking time bomb. Among such a litany of transgressions, the offense for which he is being charged is rather mild.

Is anti-corruption enough for the people?

The ruling National People’s Power (NPP), which was elected on a platform of anti-corruption, may be counting on the optics of blue-blooded Wickremesinghe in handcuffs to shore up its image as a people’s movement. While the arrest will appease the core electoral base of the NPP, it will also infuriate the divided right, possibly creating conditions for unity. Two days after Wickremesinghe’s arrest, politicians from the main opposition parties gathered at a joint press conference under the slogan “Let’s defeat the constitutional dictatorship”, arguing that Wickremesinghe’s arrest was “anti-democratic” and an act of “political revenge”.

It is important to note that the NPP’s victory in the 2024 presidential election was fragile – the party benefitted from a political opportunity that arose from the collapse of the center-left and splits over leadership on the right. Dissanayake was Sri Lanka’s first president to enter office with less than half (42%) of the popular vote. By contrast, if the votes of the center-right UNP and its breakaway, the Samagi Jana Balawegaya, had been united, they would have yielded a hairline majority of 51%.

The symbolism of Wickremesinghe’s arrest may not be enough to satiate the needs of the thousands of voters whose concerns are more material than ideological. Currently, about half of Sri Lankan households skip a meal a day. According to a recent study, 50% of public university graduates emigrate in search of better opportunities. Around the same time as the dramatic arrest, around 17,000 postal workers were on strike. Meanwhile, workers have protested against the unbundling of the functions of the state-owned electricity monopoly – a move which unions argue could be a precursor for privatization, though the government has assured otherwise.

The NPP’s continuation within the basic framework of the IMF’s austerity agenda and disastrous debt restructuring deal leaves little room for productive investment. The party needs to use the political space from its majority in parliament and navigate processes within the Global South if it wishes to deliver on the slogan of “system change”. Rebuilding state capacity and prioritizing investments that support economic sovereignty are the needs of the hour. If these and other structural problems are not addressed, Wickremesinghe – and the interests he represents – may yet have the last laugh.

Shiran Illanperuma is a Sri Lankan journalist and political economist. He is a researcher at Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research and a co-editor of Wenhua Zongheng: A Journal of Contemporary Chinese Thought.

This article was produced by Globetrotter.

The post What the arrest of a former president means for Sri Lanka appeared first on Peoples Dispatch.

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