UNP-SJB unity debate revives questions over lost voters, Sajith Premadasa’s rise and whether old UNP bases can return.
UNP-SJB unity has once again raised the central question in opposition politics: can the two sides win back the voters they lost?
“If the UNP is to win again, the UNP must change. In the Bible, Jesus says that sinners can enter heaven only if they change so completely that it would be like a camel passing through the eye of a needle. If we are to come to power, we too must change as drastically as a camel squeezing through the eye of a needle.”
That was what J.R. Jayewardene told a group of UNP leaders who met him after the party’s crushing defeat at the 1970 General Election.
J.R. then transformed the UNP exactly as he had promised. He understood that the party could no longer win elections by depending only on the village elite.
By then, the UNP had developed the image of an elitist capitalist party. Many people believed that to become a UNP electorate organiser, or even a municipal council candidate, a person had to be wealthy, influential and socially prominent.
J.R. wanted to destroy that perception. He opened the doors of Sirikotha to ordinary people.
One of the clearest examples of that shift was his decision to elevate Ranasinghe Premadasa. J.R. wanted to show that the UNP was no longer merely a party of the privileged and wealthy.
After the death of Dudley Senanayake, when J.R. became party leader, he appointed young men from humble village families as electorate organisers.
The first election he faced after reshaping the party was the Ja-Ela by-election.
At the time, party elites were trying to nominate a young man from a prominent Ja-Ela family. But Premadasa came to meet J.R. with a different suggestion.
“Sir, this young man works at Rathnawali film Hall in Ja-Ela. He comes from a modest family. Let’s nominate him,” Premadasa said.
That young man was Joseph Michael.
“This is the perfect opportunity to demonstrate the party’s transformation. Let us nominate this young man and show the country that the UNP is now the party of the common man,” J.R. replied, accepting Premadasa’s proposal fully.
The UNP’s historic 1977 landslide, which delivered a five-sixths majority in Parliament, was achieved by combining J.R.’s support among elite classes with Premadasa’s strength among the poor.
In reality, D.S. Senanayake had originally built the UNP by bringing together Sri Lanka’s wealthiest elite and its poorest citizens.
The poor were drawn toward the UNP largely because they depended economically and socially on the village elite. S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike, however, built the SLFP around the middle class.
Later, when the Lanka Sama Samaja Party and the Communist Party joined hands with the SLFP, many poor voters in both urban and rural areas moved toward the SLFP-left alliance.
D.S. had attracted poor voters to the UNP by fielding influential village elites as candidates.
In contrast, the SLFP-left alliance increasingly nominated schoolteachers, indigenous physicians and other ordinary people. That made poorer voters more willing to accept leadership from people who looked and lived like them.
At the same time, reforms such as changes to land laws, the nationalisation of plantations and the nationalisation of bus companies weakened the control that village elites had long exercised over poorer communities.
That was another reason the UNP gradually lost the support of poorer voters.
J.R. and Premadasa understood these social realities when they opened the party to ordinary people.
Until 1977, the SLFP and the left had branded the UNP as a party of wealthy elites.
After 1977, J.R. used Premadasa to counter that attack by portraying the SLFP as a party controlled by aristocratic families.
Premadasa successfully built a massive poor voter base for the UNP.
Programmes such as Gam Udawa, the Foster Parents Scheme and Janasaviya were specifically designed to uplift the poor.
By the time Premadasa was assassinated, he had firmly secured that voter base for the UNP.
Even after his assassination, the strength of that support remained visible.
At the 1993 Provincial Council elections, the UNP won majorities in every provincial council except the Western Province, largely because Premadasa’s voter base remained intact.
However, after D.B. Wijetunga became President and weakened Premadasa’s image, and after Ranil Wickremesinghe became party leader and brought the English-speaking elite back into the party, the poor voter base that Premadasa had built began to decline.
The rise of Sajith Premadasa within the UNP helped revive and strengthen that support base.
Ranil and Sajith worked together, and in 2014 Sajith was appointed Deputy Leader. He led the UNP campaign at the Uva Provincial Council election, helping rebuild the party’s grassroots strength.
The opposition’s success in defeating the Rajapaksa family at the 2015 presidential election by fielding Maithripala Sirisena, a man from a social background similar to Premadasa’s, was also made possible by the revival of support among ordinary voters.
When Sajith formed the Samagi Jana Balawegaya and contested the 2020 General Election, many UNP leaders realised the party was heading toward disaster.
They went to see Ranil and expressed their concerns. Ranil’s response was unexpected.
“When powerful leaders like Lalith and Gamini left the UNP, they managed to take only about one million votes with them. How many can Sajith take? At best, perhaps half a million.”
That was Ranil’s calculation.
But the result proved otherwise.
The UNP ended up with only around 250,000 votes, while Sajith secured nearly 2.7 million votes.
The obvious question is this:
“What happened to the 2.5 million votes that D.S., Dudley and J.R. had built for the UNP?”
Ranil failed to protect that voter base.
Sajith, however, appears to have retained the 2 to 2.5 million votes that Ranasinghe Premadasa had built for the party.
That raises another important question:
“If the SJB and the UNP reunite, can they bring together the voter bases created by D.S., Dudley and J.R.?”
Despite the powerful Gotabaya Rajapaksa wave in 2020, the SJB still secured 2.7 million votes.
During the Anura Kumara Dissanayake wave in 2024, Sajith increased his vote tally to 4.3 million at the presidential election, even though Ranil contested separately and divided the traditional UNP-SJB vote.
Looking ahead to a future presidential election, the SJB would not find it difficult to add another two million votes to the 2.2 million votes it received at the local government elections, which were the party’s most recent electoral test.
Those additional votes would likely come from minority communities and floating voters.
In a closely fought presidential or parliamentary election where the winner remains uncertain, securing those two million votes would not be impossible.
Yet the central question still remains:
What happened to the votes that D.S. Senanayake, Dudley Senanayake and J.R. Jayewardene built for the UNP over several decades?
