Five solutions that Malaysian liberals should consider (Part 2)

 

What should Malaysian liberals do if they can accept the brutal realities in Malaysian politics?

These realities are:

• The liberal-minority bloc cannot constitute an electoral majority.

• Their preferred bloc must make some compromises with either Malay nationalists (Umno) or Muslim nationalists/Islamists (PAS) to form and lead a federal government.

• Malay unity is the rational response by Umno and PAS to the first-past-the-post (FPTP) electoral system.

• Endless culture wars are inevitable as long as Malay-Muslims crave political unity.

Here are five realities that may offer some solutions for the liberals to consider.

1. Harapan-Bersama rivalry needs to be managed

Whether they dismiss Bersama as a spoiler or they cannot wait for Bersama to cause a ground zero to rebuild the progressive force, liberals need to accept that they cannot wish away the rivalry between Pakatan Harapan and the new party.

FPTP ruthlessly punishes any political bloc that splits its votes, but no, the solution is not to shut down competition.

In some countries like the US and Taiwan, rivals from the same camp resort to primaries or opinion polls to help voters concentrate votes on the most promising candidate.

In Malaysia, culture war and fear-mongering help consolidate the nationalist vote. However, it would be naïve to think Harapan too can use fear to sell unity.

Unlike nationalist voters, reformist voters who form a substantial part of Harapan’s base treasure principledness over expediency. A hasty make-up of Harapan and Bersatu would kill both.

In both Harapan and Bersama, there are leaders and supporters who believe their preferred party’s survival depends on the collapse of the other, so that there would be a single coalition/party for the progressive electorate.

The analogy I used on Umno and PAS applies to Harapan and Bersama too: two brothers are fighting despite ideological closeness because they pursue the same love interest.

Here is the reality. Holding all things constant, Umno-PAS unity can flip Harapan’s 28 parliamentary seats in the peninsula, leaving it with only 43 seats.

But this is the ceiling, not the floor. The Pan-Harapan camp, including Bersama, may win much less, like 23 to 33 seats in the peninsula, putting aside vote-splitting, if the turnout is low.

Allowing a ground zero in GE16 may lead to a thorough backlash in GE17, like what happened in the United States midterm elections. But it might also cause more brain drain, capital flight, and political withdrawal, making a reversal much more difficult.

A collapse of the progressive bloc may roll back reform and inclusion, so much so that the political efficacy of ordinary voters, especially the liberal-minority segment since 2008 or 1998, may evaporate.

Former prime minister Najib Abdul Razak going home on royal dictate is the loudest reminder, if you have not heard it.

Former prime minister Najib Abdul Razak

A more practical solution might be to recognise and manage multiparty competition within the progressive camp, not just in GE16 but even beyond.

Instead of treating the upcoming elections as a civil war battlefield, turn them into arenas of positive competition to excite voters to turn out and cast their ballots.

Nationalists hate and fail in embracing competition. Liberals should thrive in it. This mentality reform may be more fundamental than policy reforms.

2. Voters who don’t vote are game changers

In GE15, the number of abstaining voters exceeded the winning margin (commonly called “majority”) in 165 parliamentary constituencies.

The highest difference was 58,302, or 40.71 percent of the total electorate (143,229) in P219 Miri, Sarawak, where the abstention (64,461) completely dwarfed the margin (6,159).

Of course, you don’t need all the abstained voters to turn out to flip the election. Here are the top 10 smallest margins in GE15: Lubok Antu (100), Putatan (124), Gua Musang (163), Tuaran (233), Kanowit (236), Jasin (322), Bagan Datuk (348), Lumut (692), Bentong (708) and Labuan (708).

You can see the rest here.

In the 2021 Malacca state election, BN won 75 percent of the seats with just 38.39 percent of the votes. Why?

This was not just the outcome of FPTP with malapportionment and gerrymandering of constituencies. A low turnout of 65.85 percent (then at the tail end of Covid 19) made such obscene over-representation possible.

Out of 28 seats, 13 were won with fewer than 1,000 votes. BN won 10 and PN the remaining three. Had enough abstaining voters gone for the first runner-up, it would have been Harapan eight, PN three and BN two.

The lowest was in Serkam, with only 79 seats, where BN (5,038) marginally overtook PN (4,959). You can see the rest here.

Turnout is now lower than before 2022 because of two factors. Political fatigue is only the second.

The first is automatic voter registration (AVC), which makes it possible for apolitical voters to turn out to vote at the last minute, more likely driven by anger or fear than gratitude.

(Undi18 only contributed to about 20 percent of new voters when both Undi18 and AVC were introduced at the end of 2021.)

Non-voters are normally ignored by political parties. If you treat them like a party, which I call “Parti Aku Malas Undi” (Pamu), this is easily the second-largest party, if not the largest.

If the progressive parties or opinion leaders want to change the electoral outcome, they must reach out to Pamu.

The question: will their conversations draw Pamu members to polling booths or further drive them away?

3. Reduced partisan hatred can reduce royal overreach

Let’s address the elephant in the room. What we see in Malaysia is not the standard practice of a constitutional monarchy, where the majority party nominates one single leader to form the government, not three names to be chosen by the monarch.

Why? Royal overreach is closely linked to the deep and toxic partisan divide, and I would argue it is more a consequence than a cause.

For democracy to consolidate after transition, political parties and politicians must be able to see each other as rivals with common interests, and they must work together to keep power within them instead of seeking the support of unelected institutions to undermine each other.

Appreciation of a competitor-collaborator relationship is nothing new but, in fact, as old as the founding of guilds and trade chambers.

Lawyers, doctors, engineers, architects, and accountants compete with each other, but they would also act together through their professional bodies to protect their interests as a profession. This is what we lack in our political class.

This has, in turn, two root causes. First, the legacy of a one-party state caused politicians to want maximum power and believe in jungle law. Second, the deepened conflicts in identity politics have raised the importance of monarchies.

There is, therefore, no other way to enhance parliamentary democracy than by building an environment of multi-party coexistence.

Messy as they may be, hung parliaments, coalition governments, confidence and supply agreements, and anti-hopping laws are good for democracy.

We must remember all elected politicians have a virtue unmatched by other political players: they can be sacked in elections. But can voters organise themselves?

4. Second dimension needed to crowd out identity politics

There are two commonly touted solutions to communalism that would not work.

The first is unity. If unity means reduction of political competition, moving towards a one-party state, whether at the federal or state level, then it only weakens checks and balances and reduces options.

An all-party grand coalition is a terrible idea, like a merger of all shopping malls. But most of all, one-party dominance does not disincentivise identity politics.

The soft-spoken Hishamuddin Hussein raised his keris three times in the Umno general assembly after the then prime minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi won a 90 percent parliamentary majority.

Hishammuddin Hussein

As there were no more middle-ground seats to win from the opposition, Hishamuddin rationally did what he did to please the nationalists in Umno.

The second is uniformity. Communal politics is salient because our ethno-religious category often decides our life chances more than individual choices and efforts.

Ignoring this fact, uniformity puts the blame on diversity when uniformisation itself is politically divisive.

Our real problem is that our politics has been one-dimensional. Name any public policy; it can be turned into a communal zero-sum game in our ultra-kiasu (afraid to lose) society.

The solution is to cultivate a second, non-identity-based dimension, whether it is about class, environment, or development, inter-generational distribution, or something else. Healthy democracy requires productive divisions.

Multiparty democracy cannot exist without division - the root word of “party” is “part”. It’s through healthy division that we get choices, checks, and balances.

FPTP can never induce a second dimension. For this, you need some Party-List seats to introduce proportional representation (PR) alongside FPTP to allow non-identity-based “boutique parties” to thrive.

See my proposal and Bersama’s manifesto on how this may be pursued through appointed seats at the state level.

5. The ultimate fix lies in society, not politics

It is tempting to imagine “good yesteryears” and lament how ethno-religious relations have deteriorated, and how democratisation has gone wrong.

The reality is more complex. Since 1946, when the British created the short-lived Malayan Union with liberal citizenship for the non-Malays and the Malays formed Umno to oppose it, Malayans and later Malaysians have had an unresolved question for exactly 80 years.

I call it the 1946 Question: Can citizens be equal yet different? Translated into simple English, should minorities demand equality before assimilation?

This is why the call to reform the New Economic Policy is often met with the demand to close Chinese and Tamil schools.

Under BN, ethnic tensions were carefully managed so that they would never get out of control or out of fashion. Authoritarianism kept the problems alive to justify its existence. Democratisation opens Pandora’s box.

Liberals are frustrated because two Harapan-led governments did not bring many of the over-promised changes.

Bringing in list proportional representation seats can remove the need for Malay parties to unite and, therefore, hopefully lessen the culture war episodes. But ultimately there is a limit to how much institutional engineering can deliver.

The ultimate fix lies in society, not politics. We need inter-communal reconciliation, not just regime change.

And that’s exactly what democracy is about. - Mkini

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WONG CHIN HUAT is a political scientist at Sunway University and a member of Project Stability and Accountability for Malaysia (Projek Sama).

The views expressed here are those of the author/contributor and do not necessarily represent the views of MMKtT