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# What can the NPP learn from Latin America?
- URL: https://www.examiner.media/what-can-the-npp-learn-from-latin-america/
- Published: 2026-10-23T07:19:44.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-23T09:14:00.000Z
- Description: Last month we asked “Has the JVP swallowed the NPP?” Andres Mejia Acosta and Mick Moore offer an alternative explanation: by imposing tight discipline on the coalition, the JVP is protecting it. Their justification doesn’t lack caveats, Latin America shows what the party shouldn’t become.
- Author: The Examiner
- Tags: Week-41-2026, maintag-Opinion, Opinion

By Andres Mejia Acosta and Mick Moore

The NPP is a rare political party. Its core is the JVP, formally a Marxist party with a long history of tight organisation, internal discipline and, almost four decades ago, armed insurrection. It also encompasses a diverse group of individuals who were mostly recruited in 2019 when about 20 small civil society organisations entered into an alliance with the JVP to create the NPP. 

In the two years since it took over the reins of government, the NPP has performed well. Despite the challenging circumstances, it has exhibited a degree of coherence, consistency, stability and purpose that, arguably, Sri Lanka hasn’t seen since D.S. Senanayake was Prime Minister between 1947 and 1952\. 

The reason is not that President Anura Kumara Dissanayake personally dominates in the way that Senanayake did. The JVP party organisation, under Secretary General Tilvin Silva, plays a very significant role in shaping policy. Prime Minister Harini Amarasuriya, not a JVP-er, is influential, not least for her fluency in articulating the government’s policies. The non-JVP-ers who occupy key economic policy positions could probably enjoy a bit more autonomy if they were to push for it. They choose rather to consult closely and widely within the coalition. The NPP practices internal consultation and consensus-building to a degree that no previous Sri Lankan government has matched. 

**Only the paranoid survive**

> The most obvious motivation is political survival. The NPP faces dangerous political opponents. In the 2024 elections, it mostly swept from Parliament a cluster of squabbling political groups that were generally organised around old elite families, have a history of using control of the state to enrich themselves, retain large caches of illicit money, and currently face dozens of proven or plausible trials for corruption. 

So far, none of those opposition groups have shown any sign of re-organising themselves into more coherent membership-based political parties that might compete electorally with the NPP. Instead, they invest heavily in promoting outlandish stories about the governments’ activities and intentions. They are probing intensively for weak points in the NPP network, and for NPP-ers who could be bought over or bribed to reveal dirt. 

Silva may sound like a time-expired Leninist when he talks of the importance of keeping the Party strong and ensuring that it oversees the government rather than vice versa. But he has good practical reasons for this stance. Without the scrutiny, discipline, and backbone provided by the JVP organisation, NPP ministers, MPs, and local councillors would be vulnerable to the same kinds of intimidation, buy-over, and party-swapping that characterised Sri Lankan politics before 2024\. 

Last month *The Examiner* asked “Has the JVP swallowed the NPP?”The article’s concern was that the JVP had designs to extend party control and discipline to all members of the coalition, as part of a long term plan to establish a one-party state. There is little doubt that some JVP-ers aspire to that. But there is an alternative explanation and justification: the JVP is protecting itself, and the NPP more broadly, from real and current threats.

**Latin American Lessons**

What are the prospects that the somewhat equivocal relationship between the different components of the NPP will endure or mature? There is little comparable international experience. Recent precedents exist only in Latin America, where similarly well-organised radical or Marxist parties formed governments with more loosely organised civil society movements.We refer especially to Bolivia and Ecuador, which coincidentally like Sri Lanka, both have presidential systems. One has lesson*s* on what to do*,* the otheron what not to do. 

> At different points in time, two coalitions of this kind, led by different left-wing political parties, formed governments in Bolivia. The more successful and enduring, led by the Movimiento al Socialismo, or MAS, under President Evo Morales, remained in office for nearly two decades, from 2006 to 2019\. Because coalition partners were wary of MAS, Morales made great efforts to create intensive linkages with them. Most notably he granted them important posts in the MAS organizational structures and ensured a good number of coalition partners were placed high on electoral lists (in some ways their equivalent to the Sri Lankan national list). Facing a similar challenge, the JVP built trust in similar ways. For example, neither the prime minister nor many other members of the cabinet, including those holding powerful ministries, are JVP members. 

**What is not to be done?**

Rafael Correa was elected president of Ecuador in 2008\. The coalition that brought him to power was also an anti-elite party-civil society coalition intent on building a more effective state. *Patria* was the name of their systematic and ambitious plan. It included promises of widening rights, devolving resources to local governments, consolidating power in Congress, professionalising the bureaucracy and establishing formal succession procedures within the ruling Alianza Pais party. 

But Correa’s personal executive decisiveness clashed with, and eventually superseded, his ambitions to build a strong and enduring party. After he stepped down from the presidency in 2017, the Alanza Pais split into two. 

> Could something similar happen in Sri Lanka? President Dissanayake has considerable political and governance skills. It was almost inevitable that the president’s office should have grown in authority in the two years since he came to power. Some politicians, business magnates, diplomats and international organisations relish the fact that the President’s office is a place where one might get things done. But executive decisiveness generates risks. Recent Sri Lankan history provides abundant evidence of the damage done by over-powerful presidents. 

The durability of the NPP government depends on some balancing of power between its different components. It is not really a problem that a great deal of government policy is made in the JVP HQ at Pelawatte, or that Tilvin Silva has almost as much influence as the President. This is a way of trying to ensure that the government sticks close to the mandate on which it was elected. It is more substantially democratic than the alternatives we have seen in recent decades. They include rule by family groups, the granting of wide ranging authority in trusted individual bureaucrats, and the unremitting influence of bribery and corruption.