I have been reading a number of articles in Nepal’s English language press that advocate for, or at least flirt with, the idea that an executive presidency (or even a directly elected prime minister) would help Nepal resolve its chronically unstable parliamentary system, which has seen seven different changes of prime minister since the present constitution was adopted in 2015. An article in the online magazine, The Diplomat, explains that the impetus for this proposal comes from the perception that the country’s democratic parliamentary system ‘creates political instability, hampers national development, promotes horse-trading and boosts nepotism and corruption. To its backers, direct election is not just about efficiency but also accountability’. This reminds me of my own country, Sri Lanka, and of the rationale for the 1978 constitution, which also raised the issue of the ‘pendulum swings’ of political parties in power (although they and their prime ministers tended to serve out their term of office, unlike in Nepal), and the assertion of a need for stability and a strong executive to promote economic development.

Those who favour this idea suggest that an executive presidency will give Nepal the stability it needs to improve governance and bring about development. That’s possible. But it begs the question why a country that rid itself of a monarchy that did very little to improve the lot of ordinary people would then seek to restore a quasi-monarchy. A presidential system, whatever its flavour—and the two flavours I am most acquainted with are Sri Lanka’s Gaullist system on the one hand and the USA’s elaborate system of checks and balances on the other—contains the seed of authoritarianism. Authoritarianism is what Nepal may well discover were it to go down the same path. This is not to say that parliamentary democracies are impervious to authoritarianism; one need only look at Narendra Modi’s India or to Singapore. It is to say that a prime minister who sits in parliament and must command a majority is more likely to be accountable to the people than a President exercising centralised authority who is elected to a fixed term and cannot be called to account during his tenure (short of something as dramatic and destabilising as an extra-constitutional uprising, as in Sri Lanka). Parliamentary democracies (such as Sheikh Hasina’s regime in Bangladesh) must act unconstitutionally to assume authoritarian power, but the executive presidency vests that office with sufficient power to make the slide into authoritarianism constitutionally accomplished.

If the argument is that an executive presidency, where the president is directly elected by the people to a fixed term, will bring about stability and development, Nepalis might take a long, hard look at Sri Lanka. Sri Lanka went down that path in 1978, for much the same reasons being touted in Nepal to justify an executive presidency. A widely shared consensus in Sri Lanka is that the executive presidency adopted in 1978 has been a disaster for the country. Abolishing it was a key demand of the aragalaya, the popular uprising that drove Gotabaya Rajapakse from office. The most successful candidates for the presidency since Chandrika Kumaratunge (who tried and failed) have either promised to abolish the executive presidency in their manifesto or at least to ameliorate some of its worst features. Once in office, however, the temptation of being able to wield so much power has been too tempting to give up. This applies to the current incumbent, Anura Kumara Dissanayake, of the Maoist-oriented People’s Liberation Front (JVP in its transliterated Sinhala acronym). The JVP has historically opposed the executive presidency, but although they are now in power, with a supermajority that allows them to amend the constitution, they are stalling, arguing that an amendment is insufficient and a new constitution needed. To be fair, they might still deliver, but perhaps only when their term is up. Sri Lanka, it seems, is stuck with a system of governance that everyone agrees is bad, but which no political party will change once it takes power.

What makes that constitution (the third since the British left in 1948) such a problem? Its creator, J.R. Jayawardena, who tailored it for himself, argued that Sri Lanka would develop faster through a strong executive not beholden to parliament and the give and take of a democratic parliamentary system. However, what it helped catalyse was a civil war that lasted for 27 years as well as ten IMF bailouts, and eventually, as authoritarianism reached its peak, a collapse of the economy from which the country is only now emerging. What allowed authoritarianism to take hold were the cumulative effects of a number of provisions: the weakening of parliament, to which the president was not accountable; the president’s selection of the prime minister and the cabinet of ministers, thereby diluting the power of both institutions; the president’s appointing of secretaries to ministries, thus establishing his (or her) control over and politicising the administrative service and the police; and the weakening of the Judicial Services. The President appointed the judges of the Supreme Court, and the judiciary’s right to review legislation for its constitutionality was greatly abridged. This list is by no means exhaustive. Some measure of independence was restored to the judiciary, police, election commission, and other institutions of governance through subsequent amendments (in 2015 and again in 2022).

The purpose of the executive presidency was to give Sri Lanka political stability to bring about economic development. What political stability meant in Sri Lanka at that time was different from what it might mean in Nepal, as what was envisaged in Sri Lanka was an executive that could have more than one term in power continuously; the Sri Lankan electorate was in the habit of throwing out the ruling party at every election, which meant that usually, that party’s policies were abandoned for those of its successor. Until 1977, Sri Lanka’s politics resembled a game of trading places at every election.

In 1977, the electorate rejected Sirimavo Bandaranaike’s Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP) after it (and she) had spent seven years in power with a solid majority, during which time it had created an economic mess. Political stability and longevity in power, which Sri Lanka had between 1970 and 1977, did not necessarily bring about development, whatever that might mean.

Rather than stability, the 1978 constitution ran roughshod over minority rights and gave the country a 27-year-long civil war. As for economic development, Sri Lanka has been rescued by the IMF 18 times since it joined that body in 1950. Ten of those occasions have been since the 1978 constitution was adopted, and the penultimate one (in 2023) was a USD 3 billion loan to rescue the country after the executive president drove the economy into a ditch. The gains made in poverty reduction were lost in the economic crisis of 2022, which can be laid in large part at the door of an authoritarian president who brooked no opposition to his ideas. A directly elected president with strong executive power is not a solution to the fecklessness of government and can even make matters worse.

To be sure, Sri Lanka’s presidential system was designed to centralise power to give Jayawardena the tools he needed to bypass his political opposition; but as we are witnessing in real time, even a presidential system embedded in a well-calibrated and carefully thought-out system of checks and balances that has had 250 years to mature and work out its kinks (or not) can plunge into authoritarianism within a year of someone so-inclined taking office. The political system in the United States, as is well-known, is based on the idea that distributing power among three branches of government, each independent of the other, will restrain the over-reach of each of them. Yet its drift over time in the modern era has been to concede ever-increasing power to the executive. That, combined with the racial insecurities of the country’s dominant but numerically declining white majority led to the emergence of the MAGA movement, united behind a fascist agenda and an authoritarian leader.

The erosion of American democracy and the rise of an authoritarian president have happened despite a carefully crafted constitution designed specifically to prevent such an eventuality. In contrast, an authoritarian presidency emerged in Sri Lanka by design. What will happen in Nepal if it goes down this path remains to be seen, but I rather doubt that an elected presidency will make for better governance. Corruption and incompetence may simply transfer to an elected president, who will have far fewer restraints on his or her ability to pursue their agenda—for good or ill. As the case of both Sri Lanka and the United States demonstrates, a presidential system does not solve the problem of corruption; Sri Lanka’s presidents, especially the Rajapakse brothers, took corruption to new heights, and Trump is probably the most brazenly corrupt public figure to strut on the world stage. Nor is a presidential system a magic wand for economic development. It produced a devastating economic collapse in Sri Lanka and led to Trump’s unilateral tariff policies, as well as his assault on the Federal Reserve and the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which have damaged the economy at home and undermined it abroad.

Nepal is ethnically a deeply heterogeneous state, and a presidential system will do nothing to resolve the issue of political marginalisation that has been the bone of contention in Nepali politics for decades now. To the contrary, it is likely to consolidate the position of the Khas Aryas in Nepali politics, because it is among the Khas Arya that the presidency is likely to rotate (just as, in Sri Lanka, it is only Sinhalas who have held the presidency, and, with one exception, all drawn from a single caste). As the political scientist Krishna Hachhethu argues in his recent book, the privileging of the Khas Aryas also characterised the 2015 constitution, although federalism was supposed to counter that. Just as the 1978 constitution of Sri Lanka did not address the legitimate grievances of the Tamil-speaking people but assumed instead that centralising power in the hands of an individual would resolve the weaknesses of the existing system, a failure to more equitably distribute power among Nepal’s heterogeneous population is likely to cause challenges down the road. It is not in the nature of presidential systems to bend towards democracy; the challenge, it seems to me, is how to devise a system that gives multiple voices a say in governance. A prime minister in parliament, answering to those voices, is more likely to be accountable than an executive president ever would. At any rate, that is what Sri Lankans, after almost 50 years of an executive presidency, have come to believe.

A longer discussion of Sri Lankan authoritarianism may be found in the author’s edited volume, Pathways to Power: The Domestic Politics of South Asia (Rowman and Littlefield 2014).