Sri Lanka has a new president.
On Wednesday, parliament elected Ranil Wickremesinghe to complete the remainder of Gotabaya Rajapaksa’s presidential term. Wickremesinghe received 134 votes, defeating Dullas Alahapperuma, who received 82, and Anura Kumara Dissanayake, who received three.
Constitutionally, the process is relatively clear. Rajapaksa resigned. The presidency became vacant. Sri Lanka’s constitution requires parliament to elect someone to complete the term. Parliament voted. Wickremesinghe won.
Politically, almost nothing about the result feels simple.
Wickremesinghe is one of Sri Lanka’s most experienced politicians and has served as prime minister six times. Yet his United National Party performed catastrophically in the 2020 parliamentary election, failing to win a single constituency and securing only one national-list seat. Wickremesinghe entered parliament through that seat.
Two years later, he is president.
That does not make his presidency unconstitutional.
It does create an obvious legitimacy problem.
The political movement that forced Gotabaya Rajapaksa from office also demanded Wickremesinghe’s resignation. Protesters viewed him as part of the establishment they were trying to remove and, increasingly, as someone whose appointment as prime minister helped preserve the Rajapaksa political order after public confidence in it had collapsed.
Parliament has now given him the presidency anyway.
Then, early on Friday morning, security forces moved against the principal protest site near the presidential offices in Colombo, dismantling tents and removing demonstrators. The government argues that public buildings and state institutions must return to normal operation. Protesters and human-rights organisations have criticised the use of force.
So within two weeks, Sri Lanka has moved from protesters occupying the president’s residence to a new president using state authority to clear protesters from government property.
That reversal demonstrates how quickly the political question has changed.
The first stage of the crisis was about whether Gotabaya Rajapaksa could remain in office after losing public legitimacy.
He could not.
The second is about whether the institutions that survived Rajapaksa possess enough legitimacy to determine what comes next.
That is much harder.
There is an understandable argument from the protest movement: if the political establishment created the crisis, allowing the same parliament to choose another establishment politician does not constitute meaningful change.
There is an equally important constitutional argument: if street mobilisation can determine who becomes president without elections or constitutional procedure, then political power begins depending on which group can mobilise the largest crowd.
Neither outcome is particularly democratic.
This is why popular legitimacy and constitutional legitimacy cannot substitute completely for one another.
Wickremesinghe has constitutional legitimacy.
He was selected through the procedure established for filling a presidential vacancy.
He has much weaker evidence of current popular support.
The protest movement possesses evidence of substantial popular anger and political mobilisation.
It has no formal electoral mandate to select the president.
Sri Lanka therefore has two incomplete forms of legitimacy facing one another.
The temptation is to choose one and declare it supreme.
I think the better answer is that a functioning democracy ultimately needs both.
Law without consent becomes increasingly dependent on coercion.
Consent without law becomes difficult to aggregate fairly.
This is why elections matter so much during political transitions.
They reconnect the two.
Citizens express preferences through a procedure everyone knows in advance, and the constitutional system converts those preferences into authority.
Sri Lanka cannot necessarily hold a presidential election tomorrow because the constitution provides a different process for completing the current term, and the country remains in an extraordinary economic emergency.
But the larger the gap between parliamentary authority and public confidence becomes, the stronger the case for giving citizens a direct opportunity to renew the political mandate as soon as reasonably possible.
Until then, Wickremesinghe faces an unusually difficult governing problem.
He needs to implement policies that may be economically necessary and politically unpopular while possessing relatively little popular legitimacy with which to absorb the political cost.
This is almost the worst combination available.
Sri Lanka needs higher government revenue.
It needs debt restructuring.
It needs negotiations with the IMF.
It needs reforms to state-owned enterprises and energy pricing.
It needs enough foreign financing to restore essential imports.
Many of those measures will impose short-term costs on people who have already experienced months of inflation, shortages and declining real incomes.
Economic adjustment is easiest when citizens trust the government implementing it.
Sri Lanka has to attempt adjustment while trust is extraordinarily weak.
This creates a feedback problem.
Weak legitimacy makes reform harder.
Delayed reform prolongs economic hardship.
Economic hardship further weakens legitimacy.
Breaking that cycle requires either unusually effective policy or a new political mandate.
Ideally, both.
This is why Wickremesinghe’s experience can be simultaneously an advantage and a liability.
He understands Sri Lankan institutions and has substantial relationships with foreign governments and international financial organisations. During negotiations with the IMF and creditors, that experience may matter.
But experience is not the same thing as public trust.
In fact, during an anti-establishment political crisis, experience can become evidence against you.
A politician who has spent decades inside the system cannot easily campaign as the person who will transform it.
This is the paradox of technocratic crisis government.
The people most capable of operating the existing state are often precisely the people citizens associate with the existing state’s failures.
Outsiders possess legitimacy because they did not create the problem.
Insiders possess capacity because they know how the system works.
Transitions need both qualities and rarely find them in the same individual.
This is where institutions should compensate for personal weakness.
Wickremesinghe does not need every Sri Lankan to trust him personally if the process surrounding his government becomes sufficiently transparent, constrained and temporary.
Parliamentary oversight can increase accountability.
Independent institutions can scrutinise economic decisions.
A clear timetable towards elections can demonstrate that emergency government is not becoming permanent.
Public disclosure around IMF negotiations and debt restructuring can reduce suspicion.
Institutional trust can partially substitute for personal trust.
That may be Sri Lanka’s best available route.
The alternative is relying increasingly on coercion.
Friday’s clearing of the protest camp therefore deserves scrutiny.
A government has a legitimate responsibility to restore access to public buildings and maintain public order. Protest does not create an unlimited right to occupy government property indefinitely.
That principle matters because states cannot function if whichever political movement currently mobilises the largest crowd can permanently control ministries or presidential offices.
But the method matters.
There is a difference between restoring normal access to state institutions and suppressing peaceful political opposition.
Security forces should distinguish violence from protest rather than treating opposition itself as a security threat.
This is where governments emerging from crises frequently make a strategic mistake.
They interpret restoring order as restoring legitimacy.
Those are different outcomes.
Police can clear a street.
They cannot make citizens trust the president.
Force changes where opposition is expressed.
It does not necessarily change the beliefs producing the opposition.
Kazakhstan demonstrated this in January.
Myanmar demonstrates the much more extreme version.
Repression can make politics quieter without making the underlying political settlement stronger.
Wickremesinghe therefore needs to be particularly careful because his authority already depends more heavily on constitutional procedure than popular enthusiasm.
Every unnecessary use of coercion risks reinforcing the protest movement’s argument that the political establishment has merely changed personnel while preserving the same relationship with citizens.
This does not mean government should surrender to every demand made by protesters.
That would create the opposite legitimacy problem.
The protest movement itself now needs to decide what political success means after Rajapaksa’s removal.
“Gota Go Home” was an unusually effective slogan because it identified one concrete objective.
That objective has been achieved.
What comes next is much harder to compress into three words.
Abolish or reduce the executive presidency?
Hold early elections?
Reform campaign finance?
Prosecute corruption?
Negotiate an IMF programme?
Change taxation?
Restructure state enterprises?
Protect welfare spending?
Different protesters will answer differently.
This is where movements either become political organisations or remain civil-society pressure groups.
Both roles are legitimate.
They are not interchangeable.
If protest leaders want to govern, they eventually need programmes, candidates and electoral coalitions.
If they want to remain outside government, their role becomes monitoring and pressuring whoever governs.
What they cannot sustainably claim is indefinite authority derived from the fact that they successfully removed the previous president.
Revolutionary legitimacy depreciates too.
This is the same principle that applies to governments.
Historical achievement cannot become permanent political ownership.
Removing Rajapaksa was an achievement.
It does not give any protest organisation an unlimited mandate over Sri Lanka’s future.
This is why elections remain the essential endpoint.
They force movements to translate visible intensity into measurable breadth.
Can the people filling Colombo’s streets win votes in Jaffna, Kandy, Galle and rural communities?
Do Sinhalese, Tamil and Muslim voters want the same institutional reforms?
How should economic adjustment be distributed?
Which parties can construct coalitions across ethnic, regional and class divisions?
Those questions cannot be answered through photographs of demonstrations.
They require political competition.
Sri Lanka’s ethnic history makes this particularly important.
The protest movement has often been praised for crossing some traditional communal divisions, which would be significant in a country whose politics has been deeply shaped by Sinhala nationalism, Tamil grievances and the legacy of civil war.
But moments of common economic crisis do not automatically erase deeper political cleavages.
A movement united by shortages may fragment once politics returns to constitutional reform, devolution, language, accountability for wartime abuses or distribution of state resources.
Again, negative coalitions are easier than positive ones.
Everyone can agree that petrol shortages are intolerable.
Agreement over the constitutional structure of the Sri Lankan state is much harder.
This is why political transitions often disappoint people.
The moment of overthrow creates extraordinary unity.
Ordinary politics restores disagreement.
That can feel like the revolution failed.
Sometimes it means democracy returned.
Pluralism is messy because citizens genuinely want different things.
A successful transition should therefore not aim to preserve the emotional unity of the protest movement permanently.
It should create institutions capable of managing the disagreements that appear once that unity fades.
The economic crisis adds another complication: creditors do not vote.
Sri Lanka’s government has to negotiate simultaneously with citizens and external lenders.
Citizens want relief.
Creditors want credible repayment arrangements.
The IMF wants a programme capable of restoring macroeconomic stability.
Politicians want to survive.
These interests overlap imperfectly.
This is a classic two-level bargaining problem. Wickremesinghe needs an international agreement that domestic politics can tolerate and a domestic political settlement credible enough that international creditors believe the agreement will survive.
Too much austerity and the programme may collapse politically.
Too little adjustment and creditors may conclude the numbers do not work.
Economic reform therefore depends on political legitimacy not as an abstract democratic value but as an input into financial credibility.
A government expected to fall cannot credibly promise reforms extending several years.
Political stability affects the discount rate applied to policy commitments.
This is one reason constitutional order matters economically.
Investors and creditors do not need to love the government.
They need to know who has authority to make commitments and whether those commitments are likely to survive.
Street politics alone cannot provide that certainty.
Neither can a parliament citizens consider completely illegitimate.
Sri Lanka therefore needs to rebuild the connection between institutional authority and popular consent quickly.
The Rajapaksa resignation solved only half the problem.
It removed a leader whose legitimacy had collapsed.
It did not automatically transfer legitimacy to his successor.
Political legitimacy is not a physical object sitting inside the presidential palace.
Wickremesinghe did not acquire it simply by entering the office.
He has to construct it.
That can happen through competent crisis management, transparency, constitutional reform and eventually elections.
It cannot happen through constitutional legality alone.
Yet legality still matters because it gives Sri Lanka a framework through which legitimacy can be rebuilt without fighting over who possesses authority in the meantime.
This is why I think both the protesters and the government need to resist maximalism.
The government should not interpret parliamentary election as permission to suppress dissent or postpone democratic renewal indefinitely.
The protest movement should not interpret Rajapaksa’s removal as proof that street mobilisation now outranks constitutional procedure.
Both possess part of the legitimacy Sri Lanka needs.
Neither possesses all of it.
Perhaps that is what democratic transition actually looks like.
Not one heroic force replacing one illegitimate force.
Several imperfect institutions competing to establish enough mutual trust that political disagreement can become ordinary again.
Sri Lanka now has a president.
The constitution can answer who he is.
It cannot yet answer whether enough Sri Lankans believe he should be there.
That question will determine whether Ranil Wickremesinghe merely occupies the presidency or actually manages to govern.
