Harapan’s comeback window could soon close

Pakatan Harapan is crowing again. It claims it has the numbers to oust the ‘illegitimate’ Muhyiddin Yassin-led Perikatan Nasional (PN) regime. Proof is always in the pudding.

It could do what Muhyiddin Yassin did – go to the king. But the king mightn’t entertain Harapan. Such moves are terribly stained now. Few people will buy it. And it wouldn’t bring Harapan the kind of legitimacy it won at GE14, regardless of the current tit-for-tat politics.

Malaysia desperately needs good governance after decades of merciless corruption and policy ad hoc-ism. Harapan says it needs to push for a confidence vote in Parliament. This won’t come easily. The illiberal and desperate Muhyiddin, given his upper-hand, will resist re-calling Parliament, as he did before. On May 18, he reduced it to a facetious stunt.

Still, despite banging on about Muhyiddin and PN, DAP leader Liew Chin Tong, for example, has yet again totally evaded launching into a critique of his own side. Perhaps a cat has conveniently got his tongue.

Harapan faces problems galore. It must stop burying its head in sand. It’s time for it to deal with its many ghosts, past and present. Chief among these is if Harapan will – or can – end its internecine warfare to stand even a remote chance of a comeback. Equally fundamentally, it needs to stay in power longer than 22 months. A whole five-year term would be a miracle.

But the urgency has come. Exorcising Harapan’s demons is especially exigent as more becomes known of the subterfuge that led to last February’s coup that spectacularly swung the wrecking-ball at Dr Mahathir Mohamad, Anwar Ibrahim and Harapan. They were royally defrocked and dethroned – all by their own doing.

Foremost, Harapan must cull its nauseating lovefest with the entirely destructive and deceitful Mahathir. Second, it must tell Anwar that, like his arch-enemy Mahathir, he’s surplus to requirements. Both have been for a while. Third, both should be made to realise their own political parties aren’t their personal fiefdoms; nor of their younger lieutenants. Fourth, the Malay world may have stopped listening to or, worse, believing [in] Mahathir and Anwar.

As desperation grows, the biggest mistake Harapan could make, again, is to put its lot behind Mahathir to once more return Harapan to power. Yet it was Mahathir, whom some very foolishly people refer to as a statesman, had led Harapan off the cliff without a parachute.

Malaysia’s future has already been mortgaged to the hilt many times over by the political and ruling classes. Both classes have been rubbing the people’s noses into ‘tanah tumpahnya darahku’. They’ve been bludgeoned for decades but the majority refuses to see this or call it out.

The country today is in a far more ruinous state than any time before. Muhyiddin hasn’t helped; he has been rearing the ugly head of Malaysia’s favourite pastime – overtly vile racism and re-flowering state-sponsored corruption. In early March, 34 hours after being installed prime minister, he urged his mostly Malay cabinet to fight for religion, race and country - agama, bangsa dan negara. Meanwhile non-Malay elites, knowing aware who butters their bread, again turned their backs to the renewed blight.

Harapan looks set to face even bigger problems of finding its way back to the centre of national power. The longer it wallows in self-pity for its own slaughter – a path that was manifest before GE14, and swelled after it – coupled with denial, the stronger the Muhyiddin and PN become. So much so it’s hard to take Harapan seriously.

If Muhyiddin begins to win more praise for managing the Covid-19 pandemic that has wrecked the economy, the more legitimacy he and PN gain, the stronger their believability particularly among Malays, the better positioned they’ll be against a still fracturing Harapan.

Muhyiddin has played it smart so far. He has disengaged himself from managing the public health crisis. He has not left it to his bungling health minister, Dr Warm Water, but to the ministry’s director-general, Dr Noor Hisham Abdullah. It’s clever by halves because it propels the public image of a new ‘government’ that’s accountable and responsible and which readily appoints technocratic elites to run public policy.

Zafrul’s prediction

But that’s where the shindig ends. Malaysians won’t see another technocrat take the helm of other public policy arenas. Certainly not the economy and not finance despite the newly-minted finance minister, who hails from the private sector. But he’s scarcely apolitical.

Despite his disavowal, Tengku Zafrul Aziz is being ideologised, inevitably, if not by Muhyiddin and Miti Minister Azmin Ali. It won’t be long before he falls under Umno’s sway when that party becomes immensely impatient to rub out Bersatu or devour it. By which time I expect Azmin Ali to abandon Muhyiddin for Umno.

The world economy is still sliding deeper into recession. Not one economy has stabilised. But it’s a brave Zafrul – after more than 600,000 Malaysian losing their jobs and an economy that has had the wind knocked out of its sail – to suggest the economy will magically roar back in 2021 and all lost employment will be returned to ‘normalcy’.

Unless of course Zafrul has read special tea-leaves or he has sought advice from Najib Razak’s 1M Bomoh (and his two coconuts), it seems far-fetched to predict a return to good times next year. The cynicism is found in what Zafrul said days ago:

“We must rise again and record a positive Gross Domestic Product growth as opposed to the negative GDP forecast for this year in line with the global economic growth,” he said in an exclusive interview for a Bernama TV documentary on “Malaysians United Against Covid-19.”

How he (and Azmin) will achieve this feat is anyone’s guess. But the propaganda has begun. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) says the world economy will contract by at least 3% but, it added, it could worsen. And it’s clueless what global GDP will be next year. And it’s not often the IMF gets its forecasts right.

Most economists worth their salt are saying this crisis is by far the worst since the 1929 Great Depression. In many cases, budget deficits and government debt have taken more than king-hits that could last at least a generation.

And in case Zafrul (above) hasn’t noticed, the World Trade Organisation (WTO) says global trade will shrink 13-32%. With aggregate global demand sunk, so has aggregate global supply. Moreover, China’s economy will contract by close to 7%. In fact, for the first time, Beijing has cut its own economic forecast.

And Covid-19 has exacerbated pre-Covid trade conflicts while undermining multilateralism. In the past week, China, for example, looks to have returned to manipulating its currency. Naturally, US President Donald Trump will be breathing fire and brimstone down president Xi Jinping’s neck. There’s a chance governments might turn to autarky. That’ll be more than myopic; it’ll be a dumb and dangerously regressive move.

But – and it’s a big but – if Zafrul’s prediction does come true, could it herald the end of Harapan’s hopes of returning to power in the next few weeks? Because that’s the window in which it needs to make its play, to move against Muhyiddin in a test of sitting parliamentary numbers – if in fact, it has the numbers it claims. This could well be nothing than an old-fashion psych-war.

Because if the economy does turn around (it’s doubtful, though, and Zafrul is playing to the gallery), Muhyiddin’s popularity, credibility and legitimacy will soar. The completely corrupt ways in which he has been buying loyalists from other parties to shore up his personal power against a marauding Umno and its Islamo-fascist ally, PAS, will be forgotten – and forgiven. And Harapan will be done for, arguably beyond 2023. So much for Malaysia Baru.

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MANJIT BHATIA reads economics and international politics at New Hampshire in the US. - Mkini