Presidential blusters and legislators' ire

The Opposition has taken umbrage at President Anura Kumara Dissanayake's talkathon, as it were, in Parliament last Friday, when the final vote on Budget 2025 was held.

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Some SJB MPs have claimed that the Chair had their microphones switched off so that the President could hold forth uninterrupted, and he used the budget as an excuse for haranguing the House. The government MPs have sought to counter this argument. They insist that President Dissanayake, as the Minister of Finance, only exercised his constitutional right to address the House on the final day of the budget, and there was nothing wrong with it whatsoever.

There have been numerous instances where the legislature became a captive audience for the Executive Presidents and even loquacious Prime Ministers and Opposition Leaders. Sri Lankan politicians have a propensity to talk nineteen to the dozen just to hear their own voice. However, there is more to the recurrent argy-bargy over presidential grandstanding in Parliament than the Opposition's aversion thereto; the tendency of the Executive Presidents to subject the legislature to their loquacity can also be seen as symptomatic of the erosion of the separation of powers.

What has fuelled the ongoing campaign for the abolition of the executive presidency is that the Presidents tend to act like harum-scarum private bus drivers when they have control over Parliament. They tend to bulldoze their way through. The situation becomes even worse when the Presidents' parties happen to have supermajorities in Parliament.