The Sri Lanka Podujana Peramuna (SLPP) continues to operate with the blessings of former Finance Minister Basil Rajapaksa, but any decision on his return to active politics is his alone, party National Organizer Namal Rajapaksa told reporters in Colombo on Monday.
“Our party has his blessings. Beyond that, whether he engages in active politics or not is a decision that he has to make. That is not a decision I can make,” Namal Rajapaksa said in remarks reported by NewsFirst.
The MP also said the senior generation of the Rajapaksa family — former Presidents Mahinda Rajapaksa and Gotabaya Rajapaksa, his father Basil Rajapaksa, and former Speaker Chamal Rajapaksa — share the view that leadership should now pass down. “What President Mahinda Rajapaksa, Basil Rajapaksa, Gotabaya Rajapaksa, and Chamal Rajapaksa all believe is that politics must now be handed over to the next generation,” he said in the same briefing, as carried by Newswire.
Namal Rajapaksa said the SLPP is currently focused on strengthening its grassroots organisation by appointing new village-level organizers and developing emerging leaders, framing the restructuring as a deliberate rebuild rather than a leadership freeze.
The comments come as Basil Rajapaksa himself remains outside the country — Namal said in late May that the family “speaks to Basil less than the government does” and rejected accusations that his uncle was avoiding accountability, after the Colombo Fort Magistrate’s Court issued a foreign travel ban tied to a fresh Sri Lanka Tourism Promotion Bureau case. Basil also faces an active Matara warrant over the Brown Hill land purchase case and a separate air-ticket deception travel ban. Mahinda Rajapaksa, meanwhile, had earlier framed the SLPP’s medium-term project as a grand plan to regain power, while Gotabaya Rajapaksa filed a Court of Appeal petition on Monday seeking to block his arrest under the PTA over the Easter Sunday probe.
The “next generation” framing positions Namal Rajapaksa himself, the most visible of the family’s younger politicians, as the de facto SLPP face heading into the next electoral cycle.
