COLOMBO: Sri Lanka has all the symptoms of election fever: billboards are pasted with party slogans and pictures of presidential hopefuls, political squabbling and rhetoric are reaching crescendo and ballots have been printed. But there’s one small problem. No-one will know for sure until later this month whether the next presidential race will be this year or in 2006.

A bitter feud between President Chandrika Kumaratunga and her political foes has landed the issue in the Supreme Court, which must now decide when a vote should be held or leave it up to the elections commissioner, who normally determines the date.

First elected president in 1994, Kumaratunga argues her second and final six-year term should end in late 2006. But she went for re-election a year early, and the main opposition United National Party — a main challenger for the presidency — says that means her second term ends this year.

“The election campaign is very much on,” said Prof. Emeritus Gerald Peiris of the University of Peradeniya in Sri Lanka’s central hills. “I can’t think of any precedents of controversies like this being taken to the Supreme Court in Sri Lanka.”

“It’s a very pathetic situation,” he added.

Kumaratunga, whose father founded her ruling Sri Lanka Freedom Party in the 1950s, says she took a secret oath in 2000 to reaffirm an official swearing in the previous year that her aides now dismiss as ornamental.

They maintain that under the constitution, the fact that she went for re-election early is irrelevant and that she is entitled to serve two full terms, a total of 12 years, from the time she was first elected.

Sri Lanka’s hardline all-Buddhist monk party Jathika Hela Urumaya, which also plans to field a presidential candidate, has filed a fundamental rights petition with the Supreme Court arguing the poll should be held this year.

Kumaratunga’s camp has nominated Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapaksa as its candidate, and he will go head to head with United National Party leader Ranil Wickremesinghe, who was formerly Prime Minister, for the presidency.

“We’ve already seen a couple of suspicious VAT reductions with populist design to bring down the cost of living, it seems with one eye on the elections rather than the economic good,” said Channa Amaratunga, an economist with Asia Securities.

The raging political uncertainty is also deterring real investment in assets and projects in the $20 billion economy, whose growth has already been strait-jacketed by a two-decade civil war now in limbo thanks to a truce.

But the Colombo bourse is unfazed, up nearly 40 per cent so far this year led by conglomerates, manufacturers, banks and telecom shares to become Asia’s best-performing stock market as high local inflation relative to interest rates discourages investment in fixed-term assets.

“The equity market to some degree tends to ignore the political situation as long as it doesn’t do too much immediate harm to the economy,” Amaratunga said.

Diplomats and analysts say an election is the last thing that Sri Lanka needs at a time when tens of thousands of tsunami survivors are living on food handouts in cramped wooden shacks and concrete shelters.

Their plight has already been compounded by a separate squabble over government plans to share $3 billion worth of tsunami aid with Tamil Tiger rebels, and that issue is in the hands of the Supreme Court, too.—Reuters