The omicron subvariant is tuned to evade immunity, even from previous omicron infections.
The pattern has become all too familiar: A new version of the SARS-CoV-2 virus emerges and begins to dominate new Covid-19 cases, until it’s replaced by an even more contagious version of the virus.
This year, subvariants of the omicron variant of the virus have ruled cases in the US. The BA.1 subvariant started the omicron wave. Then in April, BA.2 formed the majority of cases. By May, BA.2.12.1 took over. Now BA.5 is in the lead, triggering a rise in hospitalizations across the country. It may be the most contagious version of the virus to date.
Why does this keep happening?
It’s evolution. The more a virus spreads, the more opportunities it has to mutate, and eventually some of those mutations will confer a transmission advantage to the virus.
Omicron showed that it was adept at causing reinfections among people who were previously exposed to Covid-19. BA.5 appears to have an especially potent mix of mutations that evade protection from the immune system.
The good news is that Covid-19 vaccines still provide good protection against severe illness caused by BA.5 and are keeping death rates down. But because BA.5 spreads so readily, the small fraction of people getting seriously sick is adding up, an especially frustrating development for everyone who has been diligent about getting vaccinated, masking, and social distancing.
Scientists are now zeroing in on what’s making BA.5 so prevalent even in an era of widespread immunity. What they learn could help contain the current surge and counter the next one, potentially allowing them to devise booster vaccines that better shield against newer versions of the virus.
And SARS-CoV-2 isn’t done evolving. Figuring out how a variant as strange as omicron arose and how it fine-tuned into BA.5 could unlock tools for predicting and preventing other variants in the first place.
Why BA.5 is good at dodging our immune systems
If viruses have a purpose, it’s to make copies of themselves. They don’t have the tools to do that on their own, so they have to hijack cells from a host (i.e., us) in order to reproduce. The copying process can be sloppy, especially with viruses that use RNA as their genetic material, like SARS-CoV-2, so mutations abound.
Most of these changes are detrimental to the virus or have no effect, but some can make the virus cause more severe disease, infect more people, or better hide from the immune system. When lots of people have been vaccinated or previously infected, mutations that conceal the virus have a huge advantage.
“The high level of immunity in the population is likely exerting selection pressure on the virus and the virus is evolving to try to get around that immunity,” said Daniel Barouch, director of the Center for Virology and Vaccine Research at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center.
With SARS-CoV-2, when a version of the virus accumulates a distinct grouping of mutations and is deemed a public health threat, it’s classified as a variant and receives a Greek letter designation from the World Health Organization.
Smaller grouping of mutations within a variant are classified as subvariants, often described by letters and numbers based on their genetic heritage, though the line between variant and subvariant can be blurry. Adding to the confusion, SARS-CoV-2 can undergo recombination, where it blends traits from two different lineages. As researchers have improved their tracking of the virus’s genome, they’re seeing changes at a faster rate.
“What is striking is the speed at which we’re seeing the virus evolve,” Barouch said.
Omicron exemplifies how major and minor changes in the virus can take root. When it first cropped up in late 2021, it stood out for its suite of distinct mutations that set it far apart from other Covid-19 variants. Scientists couldn’t figure out its heritage since it didn’t closely resemble the major variants in circulation. Its closest known ancestor dates back to 2020, ancient times in terms of the virus’s evolution.
There are some theories, however. Omicron or a predecessor may have been circulating undetected. It may have evolved in a patient with a compromised immune system, granting the virus an unusually long amount of time to replicate and acquire mutations in a single host. It may also have jumped back into humans from another animal.
On the virus’s phylogenetic tree, a diagram that illustrates the evolutionary relationship among different versions of the virus, omicron is on a remote branch from the other variants. The dots represent reported sequences, and the distance between them reflects the number of mutations that divide them:
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23845303/Screen_Shot_2022_07_15_at_12.08.40_PM.png)
Nextstrain
Compared to the original version of SARS-CoV-2 that arose in Wuhan, China, in 2019, omicron has more than 50 mutations. Thirty of these mutations are in the spike protein of the virus. These are the pointy bits that stick out from the virus and give it its crown-like appearance under a microscope.
The spikes directly attach to human cells to begin the infection process. They are also the main attachment point for antibodies, proteins from the immune system that recognize and inhibit the virus. So changes to the spike protein can alter how efficiently the virus can reproduce and how well the immune system can stop it.
Since omicron arose, SARS-CoV-2 genetic sequences show that the virus has undergone more subtle changes. There are only a handful of mutations that separate BA.5 from earlier subvariants like BA.2, but they’re enough to give the virus a massive advantage. BA.4 and BA.5 actually have almost identical spike proteins and differ in mutations in other parts of the virus.
Antibodies are very picky about the parts of the virus they will stick to, so small changes in these portions can make antibodies much less efficient. This is bad news for some antibody-based treatments for Covid-19, some of which are no longer recommended for use against omicron. But other drugs like Paxlovid still work against the newer subvariants.
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23846032/GettyImages_1358937247.jpeg)
NIH/NAID/IMAGE.FR/BSIP/Universal Images Group via Getty Images
A narrow group of subvariants taking over the world is a shift from how the virus mutated earlier in the pandemic. “[T]he fact that these omicron subvariants are becoming so dominant and sweeping worldwide is different from what we saw with, for example, delta, where its subvariants (which never got separate letters) never dominated in the same way,” said Emma Hodcroft, a molecular epidemiologist at the University of Bern, in an email. Even omicron subvariants have undergone recombination.
It’s partly a consequence of the global increase in exposure to the virus. There are few immune systems left that don’t have any familiarity with SARS-CoV-2. So BA.5’s most important trait for its success is how well it can elude the antibodies and white blood cells of people who were previously infected or vaccinated.
Barouch and his collaborators recently reported in the New England Journal of Medicine that existing immunity has a much harder time countering BA.5 compared to earlier omicron subvariants. So even people previously infected with omicron can get infected with BA.5. It may also spread more readily between people, though it doesn’t appear to cause more severe disease.
BA.5 may be in the lead now, but future Covid-19 threats could look vastly different
The fact that omicron is still spreading with just small tweaks to its genome compared to earlier variants shows that its combination of mutations is highly effective at spreading. But that doesn’t mean that future versions of SARS-CoV-2 will just iterate from BA.5. A completely different version of SARS-CoV-2 could yet emerge and start the process all over again.
“While things do seem to be at least somewhat different with omicron, in that [it’s] given rise to so many successful subvariants, I don’t think we can rule out that there may be another variant appearing unexpectedly,” Hodcroft said.
What can we do about this?
The best strategy is to limit the spread of the virus, denying it opportunities to mutate. Getting vaccinated and boosted if eligible remains critical, not just in the US, but around the world. Though vaccinated people can still get infected with BA.5, their chances are lower than those who are not immunized, they are less likely to spread it to others, and most importantly, are far less likely to get dangerously sick.
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/23846043/GettyImages_1241906016.jpeg)
Irfan Khan/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images
It’s also worth noting that BA.5 was actually detected in South Africa back in February, but only in the past month has it gained momentum in the US. This highlights the importance of surveillance. That means tracking genetic changes to the virus and public health monitoring to catch surges before they erupt.
The concern now is that, in the US, vaccination rates have hit a plateau even though most of the population is now eligible for a Covid-19 shot. Public health measures like social distancing and mask mandates are almost gone. And with the rise of at-home testing, many cases are going unreported. So while BA.5 may not cause the same devastation as earlier versions of omicron, it can still cause a lot of misery as hospitals fill up.
Even now, in its third year, the trajectory of the pandemic remains murky, and the virus could still bring unpleasant surprises. “What this is telling us: we need to remain vigilant,” Barouch said.
A Q&A with journalist Jennifer Senior about her new profile of Trumpism’s key propagandist — and where things may be headed next.
If you had to rank the people most responsible for the Trumpist turn in American politics, Steve Bannon would land pretty high on that list.
Bannon hasn’t been in a position of formal power since the summer of 2017, when he stepped down as Trump’s chief strategist (or was fired — it depends who you ask), but he still lurks in the shadows of President Joe Biden’s Washington. Just this week, he set off push alerts when he announced that he would be willing to testify in front of the January 6 House committee — a proceeding that he has relentlessly hammered for weeks.
A few years ago, Steve Bannon was the subject of plenty of media fascination. He went from running the conservative propaganda website Breitbart News to becoming the CEO of the first Trump campaign in August 2016. He then served in the White House as chief strategist but lasted only seven months in that role.
Since 2019, he’s been hosting a podcast called War Room, and it is hugely influential. Every day, from the basement of a Washington, DC, townhouse referred to as “the Breitbart Embassy,” he broadcasts his thoughts, live and unedited, for four hours a day. He has been one of the most effective propagandists for Trump and the lie that the 2020 election was stolen. Bannon speaks, and a ton of people listen — which is why Bannon has become a person of interest for the January 6 committee, and why I believe we can’t fully understand this political moment without also understanding what he’s been up to.
That’s why I invited Jennifer Senior onto a recent episode of Vox Conversations to discuss Bannon. Senior is a Pulitzer-Prize winning staff writer at the Atlantic and the author of a recent feature on Bannon and his influence called “American Rasputin.” She was given plenty of access to Bannon and his associates — so much so that, in the piece itself, she wonders: Am I being used?
Below is an excerpt of our conversation, edited for length and clarity. As always, there’s much more in the full podcast, so listen and follow Vox Conversations on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
Sean Illing
Let’s start with a basic question: Who is Steve Bannon really?
Jennifer Senior
Steve Bannon was, if you were going to assign responsibility to anyone, I would say the most responsible for getting Trump elected. He came in in 2016 and took a floundering campaign at the 11th hour and he made the campaign viable. No one thought he could do it. I’m not sure he thought he could do it.
What he also is is the guy who has given intellectual texture and firmness to a Trump philosophy, because there never really was an articulated Trump philosophy. He’s given it its contours. He’s done the best job of articulating what Trumpism is, which includes sweeping in the Big Lie as one of its foundational ideas, but also a kind of economic populism, an economic nationalism.
And I think he’s a dangerous force in American politics, in that he is the number one roaring outboard motor of disinformation in the United States right now.
Sean Illing
So you do buy this idea that this whole Trump era, this national nightmare, wouldn’t be possible without Bannon laying the foundations for what would become Trumpism with sites like Breitbart?
Jennifer Senior
I mean, others would certainly have done it. I think he gives everyone the best, crispest talking points. He’s the best at capturing Trumpism distilled, giving everyone the songs to sing, the hymns to sing from.
We ignore him at our own peril, if for no other reason than what he does is, he’s really in the business of moving the Overton window and mainstreaming unacceptable ideas. And he’s very, very good at that.
Sean Illing
We’re obviously talking against the backdrop of these January 6 hearings. I am curious what you think the significance of that event was for Bannon. Was that kind of like the culmination of his work, of all the foundation-laying he’s been doing over these last several years? I was listening to some clips of his podcast on January 5. I don’t know to what extent he was involved in preparations or planning or plotting or whatever, but he knew what was coming, and he clearly welcomed it and celebrated it.
Jennifer Senior
So, I might eat my words, but what I would say is that he often speaks with a lot of machismo and extra habanero about “all hell is gonna break loose,” “this is gonna be epic,” ”our people are ready!”
But then he means that they’re ready to man the phones. And that they’re ready to tweet. He’s such a dervish of chaos that I don’t know if I would necessarily say that he was responsible in any logistical way for January 6. But he was one of the architects, surely, of the legislative insurrection, which he was very invested in. And more to the point, I think he was responsible for organizing the energy behind it.
Sean Illing
Right. That’s what I’m thinking of.
Jennifer Senior
Yeah. In that way, I do think that you can.
So Steve Bannon’s podcast is really interesting, in that it’s not entertainment. It is a show that is explicitly aimed at energizing the Trump base. And it’s there to inflame. He’s there to be a televangelist. And he does things that televangelists do. He rouses his audience and he sort of gets them going through a mixture of praise and attaboys and attagirls and inspirational messaging.
And he says to them, “You can make a difference. Use your agency.” He has all these little catchphrases. “Put your shoulder to the wheel.” “Be a force multiplier.”
And every single guest who comes on his show provides their own testimonial, their own success story: “I didn’t think that I could be a local activist, but then I discovered that I could. And here’s how, and here are the phone numbers to call.” And at the end of every segment, he ends by saying, “How can our audience reach you? How can they find you? What’s your Twitter handle? What’s your Gettr handle? What’s your website?”
And what we learned from January 6 is you don’t need that many people to breach a capitol. A few thousand people can create total havoc. So the fact that Steve Bannon might not be as popular as say, Ben Shapiro, or Joe Rogan, is not what matters in this case. It’s how motivated his audience is, even if it’s smaller.
Sean Illing
Well, it’s interesting that you use the word televangelist there. When I think of a televangelist, I think of a bullshit artist, I think of a religious entrepreneur.
Do you think he is just a complete grifter? I mean, I honestly don’t know if he’s a revolutionary or just a well-financed shitposter. I guess I’m asking if you think he really believes in what he’s doing. I think he knows when he’s full of shit, but the question is, does he see it as a means to some noble end or is it just the grift and nothing besides?
Jennifer Senior
It’s the best question. And it’s what I set out to answer.
The problem is that when somebody is as practiced at bullshitting as he is, the answer in some ways has to be both. Because you can’t have two sets of books for very long without, in some way, trying to intellectually reconcile them, so that you’ve only lied once. And then afterwards you believe your own lie. I think that that might just be the psychology of grifting.
We know that he’s living very lavishly, thanks to others. He’s got houses all over the place. He’s partial to nice hotels. When he was trying to get the European populist nationalist movement off the ground, he stayed in all these fabulous luxury suites financed by others. He takes private jets that are owned by others. The Mercers underwrote him.
So I think it’s kind of not a choice. It might be both.
What is interesting is, if you ask anybody around Steve, if you ask the people who know him and who like him, does he truly believe that the election was stolen? The number who will say, yes… Did anyone say yes to me, now that I think about it? Oh my God. I mean, so many people, if they’re trying to protect him, they’ll say they don’t know.
No smart people, no people who live within the Beltway who know how politics works, no one who really knows anything about elections believes this election was stolen. That’s the bottom line.
And the January 6 hearings played this out.
Sean Illing
To your credit — and this is something I’ve wrestled with, because I’ve written about Bannon — I wonder if people like you and I have made him appear more important than he really is. If merely by talking about him, we’re doing his bidding.
You play with the idea that Bannon was using you in your piece. And I mean, on some level, the answer has to be, yes, because he wouldn’t do it if he didn’t think he was getting something out of it. Now, maybe he’s wrong about whatever he thinks he’s getting, but he must think he’s getting something out of it.
What do you think he got out of this? What do you think he thinks he got out of this, out of allowing you that kind of access?
Jennifer Senior
Honestly, I think that he, in some ways, he has the same desire for mainstream coverage and mainstream respectability as his boss. It’s as simple as that. He’ll take any opportunity to own the libs. He keeps his television [on] all day long, all it runs is MSNBC.
He can claim that we’re all very obsessed with Donald Trump and that he lives in our heads, rent-free. But the problem is we live in his head rent-free, too. He’s obsessed with us. He really is. And having MSNBC on all day long is really evidence of something quite profound. He thinks the Atlantic is an important destination, and that it’ll sort of widen his ambit a little bit.
And let me just say this: I don’t feel like I’m doing something dangerous in platforming him. We’re a little bit past that naive argument. Exposure is not an endorsement. Exposure is journalism. And Steve Bannon is doing what Steve Bannon is doing whether we pay attention to him or not, whether we stick our fingers in our ears and cover our eyes or not.
What he is doing is providing the most radical set of talking points for the Republican Party. He is a font of disinformation. And he’s got a very active audience that will go out and use this disinformation.
And most important: He’s very committed to the precinct strategy. He is getting people precinct by precinct to become election monitors, to become parts of school boards so that they can control the curriculum. If you become a precinct captain, eventually you can have a great deal of power within elections. And you can be quite consequential.
Democrats would do well to take note of this strategy. And let me say one thing to this point about, “What are you doing handing him the microphone?” By listening to him, he has been saying for months that the second the Republicans take over, they ought to impeach Joe Biden and that the first article of impeachment ought to be “failure to protect and defend,” because there are so many undocumented immigrants coming over the border from Mexico.
And sure enough, a poll came out not that long ago, saying that 70 percent of all registered Republican voters now think that the first thing the House Republicans should do when they take control, which they will in 2023, is impeach Biden. So, maybe they would’ve done it without Bannon. But he is part of that right flank that is mainstreaming these ideas.
Sean Illing
He strikes me, in a very weird way, as a deeply religious thinker, in the sense that he is obsessed with apocalyptic decline and order and rebirth.
Jennifer Senior
This is an important point. You could argue that this plays into some part of him that is a seeker. And fundamentally kind of itinerant. Can’t stay at any organization for very long. He has embraced all kinds of spiritual practices. He’s got a Zen bench.
He’s dabbled in Hindu traditionalism. He’s super into the work of Gurdjieff, this obscure-ish Russian mystic and philosopher. I think what one genuinely detects in Steve Bannon is a restlessness. That’s absolutely there. And I don’t think it’s horse shit that he wakes up every morning and has some kind of spiritual practice.
The fact that he’s bounced from one to another is interesting. Right? I mean, that alone suggests that there’s still a promiscuity to his practices. He’s still working it out, that he hasn’t found what he’s looking for yet.
Sean Illing
Or he’s a seeker who became a zealot. And a monomaniacal one at that.
Jennifer Senior
I do think that this spiritual dimension of Bannon’s seems authentic to me. It does feel genuine.
Sean Illing
Okay, so, he wants to sweep away the whole edifice of decadent, modern, liberal democracy in order to — what?
Jennifer Senior
This is the problem. It is content-free.
Sean Illing
Right. I mean, content-free is a good way to put it. For me, it’s just, it’s pure negation, right? It’s a giant “No.”
And so it may be content-free, but there is a strategy. And a very formidable one at that. You’ve mentioned misinformation and disinformation a few times in this conversation. And I wrote a piece about this idea of flooding the zone with shit. And I credit Bannon in large part with introducing that, and what I have said before, and I’ll say it again, is that he understands the political press better than the political press understands itself.
I think he very successfully hacked the media. And the idea here was always pretty simple, right? The press is set up to mediate a functioning liberal democracy. We’re supposed to sift fact from fiction, and we give the public the information they need to make enlightened political choices. You know, at least that’s the fantasy.
But Bannon just said no, no, I’m going to short-circuit that process by flooding the ecosystem with misinformation and overwhelm the media’s ability to mediate. So he just lies repeatedly and shamelessly and watches the press fumble over itself, attempting to debunk all those lies and actually just reinforce them with their coverage.
He’s been a kind of mastermind at that.
Jennifer Senior
This is Hannah Arendt territory, right? What you do eventually is just exhaust people. You numb them.
Sean Illing
Yeah. Do you think I’m giving him too much credit there?
Jennifer Senior
No, no, no. I think that he takes pride in being a propagandist. Andrew Breitbart called him the Leni Riefenstahl of the Tea Party movement.
And I asked him how he felt about that. He said, well, setting aside Leni Riefenstahl’s politics, I take that as a compliment, essentially, because she was a very good propagandist.
Sean Illing
What does the next January 6 look like, Jennifer? As you described in the piece, as you’ve described in this conversation, he has this podcast called War Room. And really, this entire approach to media that cultivates an atmosphere of emergency, that instills in the audience very self-consciously a sense of besiegement. That game, in order to keep going, has to continue to escalate. And escalate. And escalate. So what is next?
Jennifer Senior
2022 is a lost cause. I think that the House is going to be overwhelmingly run by Republicans and the Senate will also move into Republican hands. Maybe Roe slightly changes that calculus for the Senate, but maybe not.
So assuming that we’ve got that, then the question is: Will there be two years of backlash to them? And then in 2024, would the Democrats have regained enough steam to capture the White House, no matter who the nominee is?
But if you’ve got people like Bannon who are claiming that the whole apparatus for tallying votes is illegitimate, will enough people reject election results that this becomes a much worse problem? I don’t know. Or will the infrastructure once again barely hold, because enough people who are not election deniers will still be in office?
Sean Illing
Yeah, well, we know what he wants. He’s an accelerationist. He wants the destruction of the present political order.
Jennifer Senior
Exactly right. If he truly believed that history just worked in cycles, he could just sit aside and watch it all unfold. But he’s a participant.
Sri Lanka’s president is out. Now comes the hard part.
Sri Lankan President Gotabaya Rajapaksa resigned Thursday by email, after a herculean people-power movement fueled by anger over corruption and massive inflation toppled his government. Although it’s a major victory for Sri Lankan activists, Rajapaksa’s resignation raises existential questions about how the country’s political structure, economy, and the protest movement that brought him down will forge ahead.
Gotabaya fled the country earlier this week, reportedly heading first to the Maldives, then on Thursday boarding a Saudi Arabian Airlines flight to Singapore, flight tracking data shows. His resignation has been a key demand of protesters, but it’s far from the political overhaul many see as critical to getting the country functional again.
The Rajapaksa administration’s rampant corruption and disastrous economic policies culminated in months of sustained, nonviolent action by hundreds of thousands of Sri Lankans from all over the country, of a wide variety of ethnicities and backgrounds — a testament to the severity of the economic and political catastrophes, including unsustainable debt, staggering inflation, and general, overwhelming scarcity that Gotabaya, his brothers, and his cronies brought on the nation.
“All the countries of South Asia used to look at Sri Lanka as the place with the highest development indices — definitely highest literacy,” Tamanna Salikuddin, director of South Asia programs at the US Institute of Peace, told Vox in an interview Saturday. “It’s obviously a much smaller population than any of its neighbors — India, Pakistan, or Bangladesh — but it’s always had a high GDP per capita, high standard of living, Colombo was this sort of modern, fancy city with the nice restaurants and all of that.”
Now, people wait in line for days just to buy fuel; inflation was at 54.6 percent as of June according to the Central Bank of Sri Lanka; and the government owes its various creditors $51 billion after having defaulted on its repayments for the first time in May.
Gotabaya won the presidency by popular vote by a landslide in 2019, but he wasn’t the first Rajapaksa to hold the office. His brother, Mahinda, previously held the office from 2005 until 2014 when he was voted out. Under Mahinda, the government took out billions in loans to fund flashy infrastructure projects, ostensibly to create jobs, but instead they helped plunge the country into the worst economic crisis of its existence as an independent nation, as the Guardian’s Hannah Ellis-Petersen reported last week. Gotabaya, with Mahinda as his prime minister, and their brother Basil as minister of finance, continued a disastrous economic policy.
Successive crises — including 2019’s Easter Sunday terrorist attacks on churches, the Covid-19 pandemic, and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine early in 2022 — halted Sri Lanka’s tourism industry. That meant the end of a major economic driver and source of foreign currency, which the government used to import basic necessities like fuel and food.
The government then failed to raise taxes, request assistance from the International Monetary Fund (IMF), or adjust its policy to contain the problem, allowing inflation to spiral out of control and draining its foreign currency reserves until citizens could no longer access the goods they need. Then, in 2021, the government banned the import of chemical fertilizers to preserve its dwindling stockpile of foreign currency, in the process decimating the agricultural sector and forcing the government to spend more importing necessities than it saved on fertilizer imports.
Now, with Gotabaya out of office, Ranil Wickremesinghe — an ally of the Rajapaksa clan and six-time former PM whose last stint started in May, when Gotabaya appointed as prime minister following Mahinda’s resignation — is the acting president and finance minister. He could likely be the interim president, should his Sinhalese nationalist party, founded by Basil Rajapaksa, Sri Lanka Podujana Peramuna (SLPP) maintain unity in Parliament.
“Per the constitution, he’s acting president until they hold elections, so today they will be meeting in Parliament and kicking off the vote for a new president, and that will likely happen next week on the 20th,” Salikuddin said.
Wickremesinghe’s election as interim president isn’t exactly a sure thing — there are some dissenters in the SLPP and an opposition candidate, Sajith Premadasa, has emerged, promising accountability for “those who looted Sri Lanka,” which Premadasa told the Associated Press “should be done through proper constitutional, legal, democratic procedures.” However, the SLPP maintains a majority in Parliament, and there’s a strong impetus to quickly cement leadership so that the country’s economic ship can be righted.
Sri Lanka’s economy needs help now — and a president’s needed for that
Though the likelihood of continued cronyism and corruption in Colombo is still quite high, the pressure is on to form a new government so that IMF negotiations, the last round of which concluded at the end of June, can proceed, and Sri Lanka can begin the process of crawling out of its $51 billion debt.
“I think getting a president in place means you restart the process right away; I think that will be top of the list,” Salikuddin told Vox. “[The interim government] is going to get pressure from a lot of different countries that are giving them aid,” including Australia, the US, Japan, and India, otherwise known as the Quad, “to move forward with the IMF — to restructure their loans, to try to get on a program. So you’re probably going to see real movement by September. I don’t know if they’ll conclude a program that fast, but I think you will see real movement,” she said.
The government will have to impose austerity on an already-struggling populace under an IMF program, Salikuddin told Vox. “In a way it’s good that it would be this president that is setting up for fresh elections, because they’re going to have to institute a bit of pain” — likely in the form of tax hikes to get non-contingent funds flowing back into government coffers, as well as additional IMF requirements.
“The challenge will be, can they find a way to use both aid and, maybe, cash transfers to the poorest of Sri Lankans to alleviate some of that pain,” Salikuddin said.
Additionally, any IMF program will include requirements and benchmarks for economic reforms, as will aid from the Quad. However, those are likely to be incremental, and won’t bring about the full-system overhaul that protesters are seeking.
A critical element clouding any discussion of monetary changes is the massive amount that Sri Lanka owes China. “It’s very complicated, it’s very opaque,” Salikuddin told Vox. “We don’t know a lot of the restrictions on those loans.” The challenge of restructuring or refinancing those loans, though, is negotiating with China.
“China is, of course, a very important creditor of Sri Lanka,” Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said in a news conference on July 14:
Sri Lanka is clearly unable to repay that debt. And it’s my hope that China will be willing to work with Sri Lanka to restructure the debt — it would likely be both in China and Sri Lanka’s interest. But more broadly, we’re really looking to China to step up their role in debt restructurings that are eligible for treatment under the Common Framework. We’ve not seen much progress and part of what I expect to do over the next several days is urge our partners in the G20 to put pressure on China to be more cooperative in restructuring these unsustainable debts.
But, there’s a catch-22, Salikuddin told Vox. “China is not going to [renegotiate Sri Lanka’s debt] until they do that with their Western donors. Sri Lanka has loans from a lot of different people, but China will not restructure anything or refinance anything until it sees what [Sri Lanka’s] other lenders are doing,” she said.
Can people power change Sri Lanka?
Although a leaderless, grassroots movement has managed to drive out Gotabaya, protesters wonder, as the Straits Times’ Rohini Mohan put it, “What if nothing really changes?”
In the immediate term, Salikuddin argued, it won’t. Government moves “at a glacial pace,” she told Vox. “I think the question will be, how long to people stay united and focused on the goal? You might get new elections, you might get some repeal of executive presidency power that the protesters want, but will it go far enough, in terms of reconciliation with minority communities?”
The government’s economic malfeasance and the suffering that’s resulted for the people of Sri Lanka has, in a sense, been an equalizer. Now, instead of minorities, like Tamils for whom there’s never been any effort toward amnesty after the brutal civil war which ended in 2009, or Muslims who’ve felt further marginalized after the 2019 terror attacks, Sri Lankans from all walks of life feel the government fails to represent them and act in their best interests, Salikuddin told Vox.
“That’s what’s interesting about this protest movement is that it was representative of a lot of ethnic groups and it wasn’t just one community. And now you have Sinhalese majority community as upset about the government, as upset about the economic and humanitarian crisis,” she said.
The devastating, 30 year civil war between ethnic Tamils and the Sinhalese majority came to an end under Mahinda’s rule, in 2009, due in part to Gotabaya’s ruthlessness as defense secretary. Under his orders, the military launched a brutal offensive against the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam who were fighting for a Hindu Tamil state in the northeast of the country. As many as 40,000 Tamil civilians were killed in the process according to United Nations estimates, Reuters reports. Gotabaya’s administration persistently maneuvered its way out of inquiries into alleged atrocities during the civil war, putting seemingly complicit officials in positions of power and threatening individuals and institutions working toward accountability, according to a 2021 United Nations report.
“I think all of that will come to the fore, if you don’t get really structural reform and address these things,” Salikuddin told Vox. “And I’m not hopeful that any fresh elections are going to bring true representation for these groups in a real way.”
Thus far, the movement has been incredibly peaceful, from its beginnings in March until mid-July. That means that, as much as the government may want the protesters to disperse and for the status quo to return, they’re limited in the tools they can deploy to make that happen, Salikuddin told Vox. At this point, barring violence and chaos on the part of the protesters, a true crackdown on the demonstrations isn’t really politically viable.
What Wickremesinghe’s government is likely to do, she said, is try to wind down the movement, rather than work with them to achieve stability and a government that’s responsive to people’s needs. It seems they’re already trying to do so by instituting a curfew and a state of emergency, as they did Wednesday. However, protesters feel their demands haven’t been met — thus there’s no reason to go home. Creating a reasonable equilibrium is “going to actually require engagement and resolution with the protest movement,” Salikuddin said.