Communist Party on Budget 2026 says 'technocratic continuity in populist garb'

The Community Party of Sri Lanka has issued the following statement on the 2026 Budget presented by President and Finance Minister Aruna Kumara Dissanayake on 7 November.

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President and Finance Minister Anura Kumara Dissanayake delivering the 2026 Budget in Parliament on 7 November.

PRESIDENT Anura Kumara Dissanayake's 2026 Budget speech, while breaking symbolically from tradition, reveals a deeper continuity with neoliberal orthodoxy and IMF-aligned fiscal governance. Beneath the rhetoric of “economic democracy” lies a technocratic document that prioritises lender confidence over public empowerment, and party consolidation over structural transformation.

The Budget speech omits any serious analysis of the global and local economic context, particularly the imperialist financial architecture that continues to extract value from the Global South through debt, ISBs, and structural adjustment.

The speech is saturated with fiscal jargon and macroeconomic metrics, clearly aimed at multilateral institutions (IMF, WB, ADB) rather than the Sri Lankan public. This alienates the very people the NPP claims to represent.

Despite AKD's purported Marxist credentials, there is no mention of imperialist exploitation, financialisation, or the deindustrialisation of the Global North that has shifted production (and debt burdens) to the Global South. The threat of war, driven by imperialist attempts to reassert dominance through military means, is ignored, despite its direct implications for Sri Lanka's geopolitical and economic stability.

The Budget introduces US dollar-denominated local bonds, ostensibly to absorb excess forex liquidity in local banks. This adds to the external debt burden and exposes the country to additional currency risk. Debt repayments already consume nearly two-thirds of recurrent expenditure, yet the Government boasts of Rs 1 trillion in “savings”—a misleading claim, as one-third of this is invested in high-interest treasury bills, effectively indebting the state to itself.