Govern first, campaign later

 When people are squeezed, they do not want or need to watch their representatives audition for the next job.

From Dr Helmy Haja Mydin

Here’s a novel idea: I would like some MPs to do what they were elected to do. Govern.

That shouldn’t be controversial. But watch the behaviour of the past few months and you can feel the gears shifting. The open secret in the corridors of power is that we’ve moved into campaign mode.

The election isn’t even here yet. The posturing that comes before one already is.

The speeches are louder. The positions are harder. There’s a theatrical urgency about it all that wasn’t there six months ago, when the dull, patient but difficult work of governing was the only thing on the table.

You can spot the symptoms easily enough. People who sat comfortably inside the tent for years have suddenly found their “conscience”. MPs who were happy to be part of the government – with the access, the standing, the benefits – are rediscovering the language of dissent.

The complaints aren’t new. The audience is. The question has quietly changed from “What does the job need?” to “What plays to my base, what gets me into a headline, what keeps me relevant when the seats are fought again?”

So we get posturing. Statements meant not to change anything but to test the reaction. Balloons floated to see which way the wind blows. Staged little confrontations to signal toughness, or independence, or loyalty to whichever crowd is being courted that week. It’s market research, conducted in public, and you’re paying for it.

It’s market research in the literal sense, too. Real money is going on sentiment analysis. Polling on the ground. Monitoring of social media. Slicing the electorate into moods and grievances to be managed. Whole teams are mapping how you feel so someone can decide what to tell you.

Let me save them some money, at least where the readers of FMT are concerned. For the politically literate Malaysian middle class, who usually turn up, who read the details, who can tell the difference between substance and noise, it isn’t about the louder slogan.

It’s about performance. Not the theatrical kind the campaigners love. The real kind. Doing the job you were hired to do, and being seen to do it, especially on issues that matter such as tackling the cost of living.

And here’s the part some strategists get backwards. They treat communication as something you bolt on at the end, once the decisions are made and the campaign begins.

Wrong.

If you’ve governed well, the communication should be the easy bit; after all, you actually have something to say. Work on your strat comms now. Highlight what you’ve actually delivered. The bill that passed. The institution you fixed. The cost you brought down. The problem you solved instead of narrating. That’s not spin. Spin is what you reach for when there’s nothing real to point at.

There’s a harder reason this matters, and it has nothing to do with the election. The months ahead are going to be difficult. The crisis in West Asia is not some distant headline as it feeds straight into oil prices, shipping, supply chains, the price of the things people buy.

Household inflation, already the issue that keeps most Malaysians awake, is more likely to get worse than better. That is precisely the moment when government has to be government. When people are squeezed, they don’t want or need to watch their representatives audition for the next job. They want someone steering the ship. An MP who spends a difficult year campaigning instead of governing isn’t just wasting their own time. They’re absent when it counts.

Anything less than that risks fatigue. And fatigue bites hardest among the young, who have the least patience for recycled drama and the sharpest nose for being managed rather than served. A generation that’s watched promises curdle into process doesn’t need another performance. It needs a reason to believe the thing still works.

Yes, there’s that old closing move. As polling day nears, the volume goes up and a little fear and paranoia is thrown into the mix: careful of the Chinese taking over the country, the country will be doomed if extremist Malays take over, all the warnings about what happens if you stay home.

It works, sometimes. It drags the reluctant to the booth at the last minute. But it’s thin and it’s brittle, and against a tired electorate it may be too little, too late. You can’t frighten people into an enthusiasm they’ve stopped feeling.

The truth is the term isn’t spent. There’s still time. Not time to campaign (that’ll come, and it’ll find us whether we like it or not) but time to govern. Time to spend the months left doing the work instead of auditioning for the contract extension.

The best campaign isn’t the cleverest line or the most expensive dashboard. It’s the simplest thing, and the hardest. Show us what you can actually do when you’re given the chance. The voters are watching.

They always were. -FMT

Dr Helmy Haja Mydin is chairman of the Social & Economic Research Initiative.

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