Pakatan parties must beware overreach

Pakatan Rakyat components are in danger of irrational exuberance by separately talking up each party's chances of success as justification for contesting more seats in the general election.

This is a recipe for intra-coalition backbiting and is not calculated to bolster public confidence that the coalition's cohesion owes less to Anwar Ibrahim's charisma than to factors more enduring.

In the prelude to the 13th general election, exuberance in demanding more seats would create the impression that Pakatan components are already bickering about matters whose inherent ambiguity ought to preclude unwarranted exuberance.

Pakatan supporters have had good reason in recent weeks to applaud the slate of leaders that coalition member PAS chose at its biennial assembly early last month.

It is understandable that in the euphoria of victory, the newly-minted deputy president of PAS, Mohamed Sabu, a politician of vaunted multiracial appeal, got way ahead of things by piping up about his chances of victory if he were fielded in a Chinese dominant seat like Bukit Bintang.

But if Sabu's breezy optimism encourages similar overreach in DAP and PKR, the coalition would head for choppy waters on the issue of seat-sharing.

Needless to say, this is unlikely to allay the anxieties of a watching public that Pakatan is a jerrybuilt coalition tenuously held together by Anwar's charisma.

Not all nice and peachy

There are no prizes for conjecturing what Umno-BN would do at the hint of discord over seat sharing among Pakatan parties.

Not that all is nice and peachy among BN components over seat sharing. Some time ago, Umno's Mohamed Nazri Aziz placed the cat among the pigeons by saying that his party wants to contest seats lost by MIC in Perak.

Furthermore, Umno is said to covet seats in the Federal Territory lost by the MCA - Wangsa Maju being a case in point.

There is justification for Umno's assertiveness: few people these days can plausibly sustain the belief that MCA and MIC would recoup the seats they lost at the last election.

Both BN components are headed for much the same results at the next general election, with MCA almost certain to slide further down the slope in terms of parliamentary representation.
MCA won only 15 of the 40 seats it contested the last time.

It will be hard put to retain that number, given the determination of Chinese voters, as evidenced by their preferences in the urban seats in April's Sarawak state poll, to vote the opposition.

So there is some justification for Umno's wanting to contest seats on the Peninsula hitherto allocated to MCA and MIC where Malay voters are more than half the electorate.
But if they do, Umno would only undermine the principles that have long underlain intra-coalition understanding in the BN.

Principle of parity

What are the principles that ought to underlie intra-coalition understanding in Pakatan? The primary one would be that each component eschews one-upmanship.

The simple rule-of-thumb that would follow from this would be that each party is allocated a third of the seats up for grabs, overlooking the principle of parity only in states where one party is the acknowledged superior in presence and strength.

This principle of parity is the safest way to navigate the shoals in the testy waters of seat sharing, to keep suspicion and rivalry at bay.

Both DAP and PAS have agreed that Anwar would be prime minister, even if PKR does not gain the edge in seats among the Pakatan components.

That is not parity, but it is realism. It is Anwar who was the chief architect and is now the principal adhesive in the opposition coalition.

On that ark of his leadership would be built the new covenant of Pakatan's attempt at rescuing the country from the depredations of Umno-BN.

Once the principle of parity is credibly upheld over a couple of general elections, it will in time yield to the principle of meritocracy where seat sharing is concerned.

Isn't this looking at the issue through rose-tinted glasses? Isn't this vacuous optimism about a coalition in which the secularism of one component would be decidedly uncomfortable with the theocratic leanings of the other?

Well, for the umpteenth time, it need be said that politics is the art of the possible. Prior to March 2008, who gave Pakatan a chance of achieving what they have garnered in the last three years – not just the semblance of a sizeable presence in Parliament and six state assemblies, but also the credibility of a government-in-waiting?

The exhilarating thing about Malaysian politics in the last three years is that issues that have long appeared to be so many Gordian knots have begun to yield their mystification to the solvents of democratic discussion and dissent.

TERENCE NETTO has been a journalist for close on four decades. He likes the occupation because it puts him in contact with the eminent without being under the necessity to admire them. It is the ideal occupation for a temperament that finds power fascinating and its exercise abhorrent. - Malaysiakini