Parliamentary elections were held in Ceylon in 1956. They were a watershed in the country's political history, and were the first elections fought to realistically challenge the ruling United National Party. Former Leader of the House S. W. R. D. Bandaranaike crossed over to the opposition to form the Sri Lanka Freedom Party to launch his bid for Prime Minister. The party won the election with 51 seats, winning a majority in the house.

Background

The UNP government of John Kotelawala had been rapidly losing steam. It faced widespread criticism over Ceylon's poor economic performance. Meanwhile, the Sri Lanka Freedom Party now championed a popular socialist platform, calling for English to be replaced by Sinhala as the island's official language. The UNP resisted this out of deference to Ceylon's Tamil minority, but changed its position in early 1956. This only served to cost the UNP its Tamil support while gaining it little among the Sinhalese. The Lanka Sama Samaja Party and the Communist Party campaigned for parity of status between Sinhala and Tamil, with both to jointly replace English as the official language. The Tamil parties campaigned to keep English as the official language. SLFP leader S. W. R. D. Bandaranaike assembled a coalition with a group of small Marxist parties to form the Mahajana Eksath Peramuna.

Results

Bandaranaike's coalition obtained a solid majority government and he became prime minister.

Legacy

The SLFP campaign of 1956 was the first in Ceylon's history where communal feelings against the minority Tamil community were deliberately stirred up by Sinhalese politicians for electoral gain. The SLFP tried to blame the high unemployment Sinhalese youth faced on the Tamils and in effect promised not to correct injustices but to openly discriminate against Tamils via a policy of official unilingualism. The hard feelings from this campaign contributed towards the eruption, nearly three decades later, of the path to civil war. However, it also changed the character of politics in the country from the elitism that had characterised it hitherto. Members of Parliament from other parties than the Left were middle class, working class or farmers. Henceforth electorates were addressed in their mother tongue at election meetings (as the LSSP and CP had done from inception) instead of English.