Why a national unity gov't is a path to hell, Part 1

What’s next after tomorrow’s Black 515 rally? What will happen after Parliament is convened next Monday?

I don’t think anyone can be positive that Malaysian politics will have a clear direction after this. And for many, Malaysia has not been governed for months before the poll and is still not being governed now nearly two months after it. That’s just too hard to bear.

That’s why many are urging the opposition to stop protests and move on, while some are proposing a national unity government.
They hope that with either, politics will return to business as usual, or, at least everyone may get a breather. As globalisation is going faster now with the negotiation of the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPPA), lack of leadership and uncertainty is not what Malaysia can afford.

Stopping protests will not bring stability

But to think that Malaysian politics will return to normal once the opposition accepts the election result - or at least, after the dust settles for the election appeals - is wishful thinking of desperate minds.

Firstly, the opposition and many more Malaysians who want to see change are protesting not just because they are angry that Pakatan Rakyat has lost its deserved victory in the 13th general election, but because they want electoral reforms so that it will not again lose by default the 14th general election.

Is Najib Abdul Razak offering any real olive branch here? One only needs to look at the parliamentary select committee led by Maximus Ongkili in the last Parliament to know why the proposed parliamentary select committee to oversee the Election Commission (EC) - an unconstitutional move itself - will be a delaying tactic by the BN and a waste of time for Malaysia.

If Najib is serious, he must offer changes in election laws as a real gesture for national reconciliation.

The repeal of Section 9A of the Elections Act, which prohibits electoral rolls from being challenged in court and provides the fundamental protection for phantom voters, is the basic first step.  

The second step will be an offer to amend the 13th Schedule in the federal constitution which stipulates the principles and method of constituency redelineation to ensure a fairer set of boundaries nationwide. This is not happening.

What is under way is only closed-door negotiation with the Pakatan parties to amend Article 46 to increase the number of Parliamentary seats, which the BN cannot now do alone after losing its parliamentary two-thirds majority. Perhaps hoping to outsmart the BN and the EC, Pakatan strategists are being lured with promises of a give-and-take approach and eventually a win-win outcome.

The real show of Najib’s national reconciliation is on the front page of Utusan Malaysia, featuring the views of Dr Mahathir Mohamad, Ridhuan Tee, and the new poster boy of Malay ultra-nationalism, former Appeals Court Judge Mohd Noor Abdullah. Expect more of that when the Umno general assembly gets closer or as the TPPA negotiations pose a stronger threat to the New Economic Policy (NEP) way of how this country is being run.

Hence, the political deadlock would not end with Anwar Ibrahim ending the Black rallies. It will end only if Umno is willing to accept the political reality of a two-party system.

Look at DAP, especially its former Parliamentary opposition leader Lim Kit Siang, which quickly resumed its role as the loyal opposition. As gentlemanly as one can be, Lim even urged that his defeated opponent Abdul Ghani Othman be appointed as a cabinet member via a senatorial appointment, while Anwar still refused to recognise Najib’s legitimacy as the prime minister.

But how did Umno and Utusan Malaysia reciprocate to the reconciliatory gesture of Lim and DAP? DAP was called all sorts of names, and even accused of spending millions in raising an army cybertroopers, the so-called Red Bean Army.

Umno a desperate and wounded beast

But why should one be surprised that Najib is not interested in real reform or that the ultras led by Mahathir want to tear the country apart even more?

Umno’s old modus operandi of post-election reconciliation was based on the confidence that the concessions it made would bring back some minority votes. That’s why and how Mahathir’s Vision 2020, dished out within four months after the 1990 election, worked.

The guarantees of the minority voters’ reciprocity were first, Umno’s dominance of the Malay votes, and second, the realistic risk of having a replay of the May 13 riots. The disastrous performance of the Semangat 46 party (S46) in the 1990 election, winning only eight seats, confirmed the first condition while the second condition was never a question.

To a large extent, Najib’s 1Malaysia project is the new edition of Mahathir’s Wawasan 2020. It failed miserably however because of two reasons.

First, the Malay support for PKR and PAS was not going to be in decline as had happened to S46 after the 1990 polls, not least because of Pakatan’s control of five states, especially PKR’s dominance of Selangor.

Second, perhaps the credit should partially go to Abdullah Ahmad Badawi or Pak Lah, that the promised riots did not happen after the fall of Selangor, Perak and Penang. And the threat of May 13 2.0 has since become a paper tiger, more so after the disastrous crackdown on the Bersih 2.0 rally and unfulfilled promise of riots by Perkasa, which unintentionally united and emboldened Malaysians even more.
Mahathir was sharp to see the failure of the old modus operandi, what one may call “peace under measured and conditional racism”.

As early as 2010, he saw that the Chinese voters were not returning to the BN’s fold no matter how Najib wooed them. He called it “Umno’s Chinese Dilemma”.

Confirming Mahathir’s diagnosis, the fundamental decision for Umno after May 5 was to decide to do more of the same, or to do something different.

The latter means transforming the Umno into a real democratic party, which means it will commit to the democratic process but it may still position itself as a communal champion for the Malay-Muslims. This means the grand old party will need to compete with programmes, not by offer of bribery or threat of violence.

Doing more of the same means playing up the Malay-Muslim sentiments even more, in the hope that this hurts PKR or PAS or, better still, tear apart Pakatan, and from time to time, throwing out some gestures of moderation.

Clearly, Umno the desperate and wounded beast has opted for this strategy in attempt to revive itself. Utusan’s race-baiting campaign (now into its seventh week) and the earlier talk of transforming BN into a single party, or the proposal of a PSC, are exactly a classical play of this strategy.

Why a national unity gov’t will be a disaster

The intention to imagine, advocate for or plot a national government - led by either Najib or Tengku Razaleigh - to end the political impasse is unquestionably noble.

But as the proverb goes, “The road to hell is paved with good intentions”. The question is really, can a national unity government fix it and not make it worse?

Some people have cited the post-1969 unity government as the role model how a national unity government might work to heal the national divide. I am afraid such a framing is most problematic in itself.

The coalition governments that Abdul Razak Hussein (right) drew up in Sarawak, Penang, Perak, Kelantan and finally for the entire federation, were basically the nails on the coffin for democracy in Malaysia. Malaysia’s authoritarianism - what I call an electoral one-party state - was exactly founded on the basis of these permanent coalition governments, which eventually consolidated into the Barisan Nasional in 1974.

The problem with such catch-all permanent coalitions is that it kills off competition between political parties and denies policy options to the citizens. When the BN was formed on Jan 1, 1974, only two opposition parties were left in the Parliament, the DAP and the Sarawak National Party (SNAP) which, too, joined the BN later.

This fits in well with Abdul Razak’s cynical view of democracy: “The view we take is that democratic government is the best and most acceptable form of government. So long as the form is preserved, the substance can be changed to suit conditions of a particular country.”

For the grand architect of Umno’s electoral one party state, democracy was simply incompatible with a plural society: “... in our Malaysian society of today, where racial manifestations are very much in exercise, any form of politicking is bound to follow along racial lines and will only enhance the divisive tendencies among our people.”

Do we want such authoritarian stability for Malaysia after coming a long way since Reformasi in 1998, if not earlier, Operasi Lalang in 1987?

For a national unity government to really work, it must have the majority of parliamentarians from both the BN and Pakatan camps. If this could ever happen, say under a Najib-Anwar deal, it would mean we may not have an opposition except those allied to Mahathir and his son Mukhriz.

If this was one installing Ku Li, which means inevitably pushing aside Najib, Anwar and Mahathir, we would have an even messier array of opposition. How can this national unity government move away from political squabbles and focus on governance?

And if one reason for Najib’s lame duck position is his failure to satisfy the aspiration or greed of Umno and Borneo backbenchers to be ministers, how many extra ministerial posts and pacifying contracts would the new prime minister need to dish out to pull off the stunt? How can we have a better government with more horse-trading?

The national unity government is an ill-thought quick-fix, which ignores the real cause of today impasse: a legitimate arrangement of transition and post-transition party politics.

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DR WONG CHIN HUAT is a fellow at Penang Institute. He is a political scientist by training who specialises on electoral system and party system. He is also active in civil society causes such as electoral reform, decentralisation, medium freedom and civil and political liberties.