Sri Lanka Shows How to Oust a Corrupt Authoritarian Regime and Stop Democratic Backsliding

For the past two decades, Sri Lankan politics has been dominated by the Rajapaksa family, with two brothers more or less alternating between serving as president and prime minister from 2005 to 2022. Their regime was marked by corruption and sustained through appeals to ethnic nationalism among the majority Sinhalese Buddhist population, including by deliberately inciting sentiment against minority Muslim and Tamil communities.

This kind of appeal to nationalism was the dominant force in Sri Lankan politics for most of the last 20 years — until, that is, the elections this fall. In presidential and then parliamentary elections, a new coalition called National People's Power, led by Anura Kumara Dissanayake, better known as AKD, campaigned on a platform of ethnic pluralism and good governance. They won overwhelmingly, securing 159 out of 225 seats in Parliament — a supermajority — leaving the Rajapaksa party with just three seats.

Joining me to explain how this so-called "Peaceful Political Revolution" was achieved is Neil DeVotta, Professor of Politics and International Affairs at Wake Forest University. He is the author of a new article on this stunning turn of events, which appears in the most recent edition of the Journal of Democracy. We begin by discussing just how remarkable this political transition has been and what drove Sri Lankans to abandon the fractious ethnic politics of the past two decades. We then delve into how AKD and his National People's Power coalition can reverse Sri Lanka's democratic backsliding.