The Promise That Keeps Moving: Two Years On, Sri Lanka Still Has No Provincial Council Elections

In the run-up to the 2024 elections, the National People’s Power made a clear and checkable promise. Its manifesto, A Thriving Nation: A Beautiful Life, said that the provincial council and local government elections that had been postponed indefinitely would be held within a year. The Island newspaper quoted that pledge, from page 127 of the manifesto, in an October 2025 editorial.

Local government elections were held in May 2025. Provincial council elections were not. As of November 2026, more than two years after President Anura Kumara Dissanayake took office in September 2024, there is still no election date, no new electoral law in force, and no elected representative in any of Sri Lanka’s nine provincial councils.

This is not a small administrative delay. Provincial councils were created under the Thirteenth Amendment as the main vehicle for devolving power, especially to the North and East. Without elected councils, the provinces are run by Governors appointed by the President. The result is that a layer of government meant to bring decisions closer to people is, in practice, controlled from Colombo.

How long has it been?

The last provincial council elections were held in 2014. The Centre for Policy Alternatives (CPA), a Colombo think-tank, pointed out in a May 2026 statement that this is now more than a decade without elected provincial government. Most councils’ terms ended between 2017 and 2019, and none has been replaced.

Every government since then shares responsibility. The 2017 Provincial Councils Elections (Amendment) Act, passed under the previous Yahapalana government, replaced the old proportional system with a mixed system that requires a fresh delimitation of electoral boundaries. That delimitation was never finished. The Daily FT noted in a May 2026 editorial that one delimitation report has also drawn controversy over alleged ethnic or religious bias.

But the NPP did not campaign as one more government that would inherit this problem and leave it. It campaigned on fixing exactly this kind of failure, and it gave voters a one-year deadline. That deadline passed in September 2025.

The announcement that came from the wrong office

The clearest statement on the new timetable did not come from the President, the Prime Minister, or the minister responsible. It came from Tilvin Silva, General Secretary of the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna, the party at the core of the NPP.

Speaking to journalists in Jaffna on 23 May 2026, after opening an NPP coordination office, Silva said provincial council elections could not be held in 2026 and might take place in 2027 if no further obstacles arose. The Morning reported his remarks on 25 May.

CPA objected strongly to the way this was done. In its statement, it said Silva is neither a Member of Parliament nor a minister, and that policy of this weight should be announced in Parliament by a Cabinet member bound by collective responsibility, not by a party general secretary through the media. CPA linked the episode to its earlier concerns about the government’s Praja Shakthi and Clean Sri Lanka programmes, warning of a possible party-state dynamic in which real decisions are taken outside constitutional structures.

That concern matters for anyone who remembers how the JVP has operated in the past. A democratic government answers to Parliament. When a party secretary, rather than an accountable minister, tells a province that its election has been cancelled for the year, voters are entitled to ask who is really in charge.

The reasons given — and why critics are not convinced

Silva gave two main reasons for the delay. First, money: he said about Rs. 500 billion allocated in the Budget for the polls had been redirected to disaster relief and recovery after Cyclone Ditwah struck at the end of 2025. Second, law: a parliamentary committee had been appointed to decide which legal framework should govern the elections, and the government would act on its recommendations once the report was submitted.

The Daily FT, in an editorial on 26 May 2026, called the funding explanation dubious and argued the government had never intended to hold the polls this year, cyclone or not. It noted that the select committee, chaired by Foreign Minister Vijitha Herath, first met in March and had made little progress, and questioned whether a minister with heavy foreign travel commitments could give it enough attention. The paper also pointed out that the first provincial polls in 1988 were held during an insurrection, and argued that Sri Lanka has voted under far harder conditions than these.

It is worth pausing on that point. The insurrection of 1987 to 1989 was led by the JVP itself. Elections went ahead then in the face of threats and killings of candidates and voters. Today the JVP leads the government, there is no comparable security threat, and the party says the elections cannot go ahead.

Earlier, in February 2026, The Island had already accused the government of seeking to use the impact of Cyclone Ditwah as cover for postponement, arguing that elections must not be moved to suit any party’s political agenda.

The simple route that has not been taken

There is an obvious way out of the legal knot, and civil society groups have pointed to it repeatedly. Parliament can amend the law so that elections are held under the previous proportional representation system while the delimitation question is settled. CPA recommended exactly this as an interim measure. The Island’s October 2025 editorial made the same argument, stressing that the Election Commission cannot set the date on its own and that Parliament must legislate.

The NPP has a two-thirds majority in Parliament. It does not need opposition votes to pass such an amendment. The obstacle is not numbers. It is a decision about priorities.

The Campaign for Free and Fair Elections (CaFFE) put the choice even more bluntly in a letter to the President: either hold the long-overdue elections or abolish the provincial council system altogether. Leaving the councils in legal limbo, run by appointed Governors, is the one option that serves neither democracy nor honesty.

What the opposition says

Opposition Leader Sajith Premadasa has accused the government of delaying the provincial polls deliberately because it fears a repeat of its weaker performance in the 2025 local government elections. His party, the Samagi Jana Balawegaya, announced it would set up a national committee to press for the elections.

That claim is a political accusation and should be treated as one. But the pattern it points to is familiar. When the Ranil Wickremesinghe administration postponed local government elections in 2023, the NPP, then in opposition, attacked the move as anti-democratic. The standard it applied to others should now be applied to itself.

Why this matters beyond Colombo

For the Tamil-majority North and East, provincial councils are not a technical issue. They are the main constitutional promise of power-sharing that came out of the 1987 Indo-Lanka Accord. The NPP made history in 2024 by winning the Jaffna District, the first non-Tamil party to do so. Many Northern voters gave it that support on the understanding that a new kind of politics was coming. Delaying the one institution designed to give them a say in their own affairs sends the opposite signal.

India has repeatedly urged Sri Lanka to hold the delayed provincial elections, including during Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s visit to Colombo in April 2025. Silva has said there is no Indian pressure. Either way, the case for holding the elections does not depend on any foreign government. It rests on the rights of Sri Lankan voters and on the Constitution, which requires councils to be elected.

For overseas Sri Lankans, human rights bodies and foreign governments watching the country, this is a useful test. A government can talk about accountability, clean governance and system change. The harder test is whether it is willing to face voters when the result is uncertain.