Mahkota win gives DAP’s ‘softly, softly’ policy space to succeed

 

From Terence Netto

DAP has taken a battering for persisting with the unity government of Anwar Ibrahim in the face of his foot-dragging on reforms and Umno Youth chief Dr Akmal Saleh’s ill-tempered sideswipes at the party.

However, the result of the Mahkota by-election last Saturday showed the policy is not without its compensations: after Umno’s emphatic victory it would be churlish for the party and its youth chief to continue to treat DAP as fifth-columnists.

DAP’s partnership with Umno in the Madani government was premised on the need to make Anwar prime minister of the country, a stance seen to be imperative for reforms to take place, even if that required cohabitation with reform-unfriendly Umno.

The hope was that a working partnership would deflect Umno from its reflexive hostility to DAP and show up the instincts of a politician like Akmal to be what they are: base grandstanding.

Despite having the highest number of seats (40) in Anwar’s government, DAP has not insisted on commensurate rewards in terms of Cabinet and other federal appointments.

Likewise in the state governments in Perak and Pahang, where DAP’s backing for Umno helped the latter obtain the plum positions.

This may look like appeasement but it was necessary to obviate the hostility Umno had built up among its grassroots about the alleged DAP threat to the Malay position.

Life is not fair, and so are perceptions in politics, but both are not unamenable to transformative change, which in the instance of the Madani equation is being driven by DAP’s positivity towards the unity government.

As party secretary-general Loke Siew Fook, chief driver of the DAP policy of 

‘softly, softly

, said in the wake of Umno’s emphatic win in Mahkota that, henceforth, internal harmony among coalition partners must be top priority for the unity government.

Loke noted the low turnout of non-Malay voters in the Mahkota poll, saying it needed study with a view to addressing its probable causes.

Translation: PM Anwar must not neglect the need for reforms even as he continues to court the Malay and Islamic vote bank.

Political dexterity is required to avoid making both imperatives antithetical.

The result of the Nenggiri by-election in Kelantan in August showed that the Malay/Islamic vote is not dominantly the preserve of PAS and Bersatu.

That result and the Mahkota win indicate that there is much to play for in terms of garnering the Malay-Muslim vote.

Post-Mahkota, a politics of imaginative courtship may not necessarily mean that appeasing the Malay-Islamic vote means slowing the rate of political and economic reform, thus rebuffing the non-Malays.

As ever, politics is the art of the possible. - FMT

Terence Netto is a senior journalist and an FMT reader.

The views expressed are those of the writer and do not necessarily reflect those of MMKtT.