Benchmarking National Budget 2026 and making theatrics of cheerleaders superfluous

SRI Lanka’s National Budget will be unveiled on 7 November 2025, and I hope it will be significantly different from the predictable rhetoric and theatrics we have heard and witnessed in the past.

- By Ronnie Peiris

The Sri Lankan National Budget for 2026 is poised to be a pivotal document, arriving at a critical juncture in the nation's economic recovery and reform agenda

This is the first fully fledged Budget of the National People’s Power Government. Typically, on ‘Budget Day,’ the curtains will draw, and the minister of finance will step up and deliver a string of promises which, in hindsight, could have easily found their place in Ripley’s “Believe It or Not.”

Yet, that is not as bad as the excruciatingly painful theatrical farce which follows the ‘Budget Speech,’ this being the cacophony of opinions from “cheerleaders,” keen to curry favour with the government in power. The chambers of commerce, business associations, professional bodies, corporate leaders, professionals, self-proclaimed pundits, and other vaguely authoritative figures would appear on cue to deliver press releases and ‘polite’ statements that sound like those from the previous year and the many years before, spewing the same tired lexicon of mandatory praise. Some organisations and individuals do provide objective assessments. But sadly, they are more the exception than the norm.

Through boom, bust, civil war, COVID, and economic implosion, it is very evident that our business aristocracy has perfected the art of conditional commendation. Their utterances are masterpieces of linguistic gymnastics, designed to praise the Government just enough to maintain access, yet vague enough to claim technical neutrality, should the entire fiscal scaffolding collapse. They are like weathervanes fixed perpetually to point towards ‘political expediency,’ regardless of whether a gale of genuine reform or a light puff of populist fluff is blowing.