Lacklustre Government, blessed by the Opposition

"Most ignorance is vincible ignorance. We don't know because we don't want to know" - Aldous Huxley (Ends and Means)

- BY TISARANEE GUNASEKARA

President Anura Kumara Disanayake UNP leader Ranil Wickremesinghe SJB leader Sajith Premadasa

DURING her 107-day presidential election campaign, Kamala Harris (having inherited the Democratic Party candidacy after the precipitous departure of Joe Biden) tried to project herself as the true change agent.

Her 'Not a thing' answer horrified Democrats, thrilled Republicans (who used it to create many a campaign ad), and marked a turning point in the election. In her recently released memoir, '107 Days', Harris compares her answer to pulling the pin of a hand grenade. To the voters, her answer brought to mind the seminal failures of the Biden presidency, from his inability to deal with the affordability crisis to his enabling Israel's genocide in Gaza. Many of those voters, believing in Donald Trump's promises to curb inflation and bring peace to Gaza, abandoned both Kamala Harris and the Democratic Party in November 2024.

In Sri Lanka, Anura Kumara Disanayake contested the September 2024 election as the 100% change candidate, and spent most of his first year as the continuance president.

Disanayake came into office just as the country was crawling out of the economic abyss Hurricane Gotabaya had flung it into. In September 2024, the biggest fear about a Disanayake presidency was that it will bring about a Gotabaya 201, another cyclone of bad decisions wrecking the fragile recovery achieved by Ranil Wickremesinghe. In September 2025, a key criticism President Disanayake's first year is not inane adventurism but unnecessary timorousness.