On 26^th January 2010, Sri Lankans head to the polls to elect their head of state and government for a six year term and essentially entrust to the victor at the presidential election the enormous nation building challenge of the post war era. Seeking a renewed mandate for second term is President Mahinda Rajapakse and contesting him, his chief challenger former Army Commander, retired General Sarath Fonseka.

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Government insiders and definitely SLFP old timers and well wishers would well be ruing the chain of events that has transformed this presidential election from one which was destined to be a no contest landslide for the incumbent President Mahinda Rajapakse, into a very real and close contest between him and the president’s one time chief military officer General (retd) Sarath Fonseka.

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UNP and Opposition leader Ranil Wickramasinghe has long believed that winning a plurality of the Sinhala vote and a vast majority of the Tamil and Muslim vote will guarantee a presidential candidate victory at an election. He assiduously followed this strategy though out the early part of this decade and tested out his thesis at the presidential election of 2005. It almost worked but not quite. The fatal flaw in the theory, applicable at that time, was that the real arbiter of the Tamil vote was neither the TNA nor any other political party but the LTTE. Hence the Tamil vote in Jaffna and Colombo stayed away and Ranil narrowly lost to then Prime Minister Rajapakse, by a mere eighty odd thousand votes nationally. He barely crossed the fifty percent mark needed for an outright win, by about twenty five thousand votes or on average a thousand votes per district. Interestingly the Batticalao Tamils in 2005 defied both the LTTE’s boycott and the TMVP’s call to support Mahinda Rajapakse and voted overwhelmingly for Ranil Wickremesinghe.

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Hon. Mangala Samaraweera MP, former minster and current co spokesperson for presidential candidate General Sarath Fonseka, would be a busy man these days, finalizing the minimum common program (MCP) that the disparate parties that support the General’s candidacy, ranging from the main opposition UNP to the JVP and the SLMC, can agree on, as the platform on which the General will campaign and seek election to this nation’s highest office. The date of release of the common program was stated as 7^th January. In the meantime we have General Fonseka’s own pronouncements on matters as his policy platform to date. The following are a few issues which one hopes that the common program and its attendant explanations will address.

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