Spitting at the rakyat’s face

Malaysia’s people have been kicked in the groin.

Installing Muhyiddin Yassin’s so-called Perikatan Nasional (PN) through the backdoor as the “new government” is majorly troubling in anybody’s book. Not in Muhyiddin’s, it seems, or his backers’.

To back Muhyiddin’s government is to back an illegitimacy.

PN hasn’t won the popular mandate through open and fair elections. It doesn’t enjoy voter legitimacy. Therefore, it has neither the business nor the right to rule.

To carry on would be a gross travesty of justice perpetrated on the people of Malaysia.

Effectively, PN and its backers have spat in the faces of, to use an ancient Roman political term, the publics.

Yet again the people of Malaysia have been taken for granted.

Democracy is never top-down. It’s always bottom-up. Only the publics decide who governs them, whether it’s organised around a Westminster or republican model.

It is not for political elites in partnership with their ruling class chums to dictate this to the people and impose their rule on them.

To do this is to write out democracy’s death certificate. And not for the first time has democracy died in Malaysia.

Could the publics still have their revenge? A snap poll is possible if Muhyiddin can’t garner or “buy” support.

If Muhyiddin can launch a “coup” that brought a second regime change in the space of two years, anything can happen. He’s a politician but, more to the point, he behaves like an Umno politician.

All of which might explain why the eighth prime minister has again cancelled parliament to May 18 when it was to have sat on March 9 before being postponed to March 18.

The excuses are convenient. The reasons are not.

The big question is how long PN will last. How long will PPBM and Azmin Ali+10 last?

There’s something bigger in the offing that should worry the publics. It’s called tomorrow. Malaysia’s tomorrow. Your tomorrow. Your children’s tomorrow. Your children’s children’s tomorrow in politically wrecked Malaysia.

The infant PN regime lives on the abyss of quicksand. It looks doomed. It hasn’t the legs. Here’s a simple ratio: No popular legitimacy: no legs.

Harapan’s 2018 “manifesto”, as its 2013’s version, was intractably undoable given the state of the economy and the country’s finances, most of which had allegedly landed in Umno’s pockets, in the pockets of Umno-BN cronies, and misused by Malaysia Inc’s uneconomical and uncompetitive GLCs.

What isn’t undoable is the return of political repression under this regime or the “real one” to come, more so if the present regime thinks it faces an early demise or the “real one” thinks the opposition is too weak to check it.

We’ll get a good whiff of what these shifts might be once Muhyiddin has done his “horse-trading” and picked his Cabinet – assuming one isn’t picked for him by Umno, in the main, PAS, and Azmin.

So far, at least four states are threatening to buckle. Penang is safe – for now.

If these states and others (discounting Penang) should fall, they’ll fall not into Muhyiddin’s hands but into the hands of Muafakat Nasional – the Umno-PAS alliance.

And if Muhyiddin – who may feel he might not be up to the job – gives PAS extremists and Umno leaders facing corruption charges key Cabinet posts or hands them to their proxies, a Khomeini-style regime will take hold and wreck the economy.

As will, for sure, Umno kleptocracy’s homecoming.

Najib Razak, Ahmad Zahid Hamidi, Tengku Adnan, Rosmah Mansor and several others are facing criminal indictments.

But make no mistake: The publics’ personal and collective stake in the country now hangs in the balance under Muhyiddin and his supporters.

Muhyiddin is no reformer. And given the historical realities of Malaysia’s politics and economy, one will be hard pressed to change the “spirit of Malaysia” from being about money, lies, corruption and racism. Not that the spirit went away in Harapan’s time.

The return to the political centre of Umno and PAS is assured, bringing with it myriad problems and dangers. It’s up to the publics to stop the kegilaan, insanity.

PPBM in time will disintegrate. Its people are incapable.. Sacked education minister Maszlee Malik was a prime example of incompetence, which he has labelled as “mistakes”. How self-effacing.

The ex-minister for flying cars, Redzuan Yusof, is another.

Mahathir Mohamad and Anwar Ibrahim yet another.

When push comes to shove, PPBM and Azmin+10 will join or be subsumed into Umno. Guess who will rule the roost? Forget Azmin. He’ll be sidelined to become a bit player. That’s how they survive.

It’s not about them saving Malaysia. It never was. It’s about saving themselves.

At any rate, kiss promises of reforms goodbye.

Pretty soon, the rakyat will be back living in the 1946-2018 interregnum, if it isn’t already there, to again witness not Wawasan 2020 but the re-establishment of political-clientelism par excellence under Umno, where the commoditised rakyat won’t be their clients – except at election time.

Manjit Bhatia is a reader in economics and international politics in New Hampshire in the United States. - FMT