Look, who's afraid of a second coalition?
Khoo Boo TeikPublished: Feb 25, 2001 1:22 AM | Updated: Jan 29, 2008 10:21 AM
Among countries most adversely affected by the July 1997 currency crisis, Malaysia differs from Thailand, South Korea and Indonesia in two basic ways. Caretaker Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad spurned International Monetary Fund intervention and chose policies that went against economic orthodoxy. Malaysia also avoided a quick change of regime, as happened in Thailand and South Korea, or Indonesia's painful transition to democracy.
Now Mahathir, having cocked a sneer at those who predicted his capital controls, currency peg and semi-autarkic reflation would be disastrous, wants to cock another sneer at those who hold that economic mismanagement must bring political accounting.
Mahathir's dismissal and prosecution of his deputy, Anwar Ibrahim, have plunged the political system into a deep crisis since September last year. Yet Mahathir thinks his ruling Barisan Nasional can preserve its two-thirds parliamentary majority at the 10th general elections on Monday.
Whether or not they share Mahathir's confidence, some analysts evidently believe that a comprehensive BN defeat of the new opposition coalition, Barisan Alternatif (Alternative Front) will close the "Anwar affair" and secure the leadership succession essential to long-term stability.
Malaysian political history, however, indicates that another two-thirds win by BN will not produce long-term stability.
As if it were its birthright, the BN has held a two-thirds majority since its formation in 1974. But this near monopoly of power, which goes beyond the requirements of stable government, never immunised the BN's dominant party, the United Malays National Organisation (Umno) from chronic factionalism. The Anwar affair is only the latest symptom.
In the mid-1970s, the late Hussein Onn prosecuted Harun Idris, the formerly powerful mentri besar of Selangor. In retaliation, Umno's old guard conducted a witch-hunt for "communists" within the party, causing the arrest of several figures close to Abdul Razak and nearly ensnaring Mahathir. Then Musa Hitam and Razaleigh Hamzah fought desperate battles in 1981 and 1984 for the Umno deputy presidency. Following that, a temporary Razaleigh-Musa alliance nearly ousted Mahathir from power.
The struggle between Mahathir's "Team A" and Razaleigh's "Team B" split Umno and led to its deregistration in 1988. The struggle carried over into the 1990 and 1995 elections as the fight between Mahathir's "Umno Baru" and Razaleigh's Parti Semangat 46. In between, Anwar led a "Wawasan Team" of younger leaders who displaced Ghafar Baba and Abdullah Ahmad Badawi, among others, from the party's leadership during the 1993 party election.
For 25 years, therefore, the principal source of political instability in Malaysia was not Parti Islam SeMalaysia (PAS) with its supposed religious extremism or the Democratic Action Party (DAP) with its alleged ethnic chauvinism, but Umno, whose gathering implosion continually undermined its self-acclaimed role of providing "hegemonic stability" to the entire political system.
Those who refuse to acknowledge this may insist that the present crisis will be resolved if Mahathir obtains another two-thirds win, wraps up the Anwar affair, and restores "business as usual". In fact, Umno cannot look forward to "politics as usual". The party's politics can no longer be conceived in terms of isolated problems of policy differences, personality clashes, power struggles or leadership succession. Rather, Umno is fast approaching a state of systemic failure.
The party is effectively trapped -- unable to recover the idealistic Malay nationalism which defined its historic mission, but unwilling to cleanse its "corporate mission" of in-built cronyism and money politics. Hence (poignantly, given Mahathir's "Look East" policy), Umno reminds one of Japan's Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) before the latter was torn apart in 1993 by rampant factionalism. There was a difference in sequencing: LDP's crisis preceded, while Umno's followed, an economic crisis. Otherwise, neither LDP nor Umno undertook reforms to treat the intertwined economic and political afflictions of Japan Inc. and Malaysia Inc. respectively
Meanwhile, a second coalition has been asking to be born. Or, to use the terminology supplied by DAP Secretary-General Lim Kit Siang during the 1990 general election, Malaysian politics must be transformed into a two-coalition system that institutionalises pluralist, balanced and fair electoral competition.
There is a pragmatic reason for a two-coalition system. No opposition party can singly challenge Umno, let alone the 14-member BN. Parties such as PAS and DAP must "hang together" or "hang separately". Thus, a putative second coalition, always ready to ally with Umno dissidents, has suggested itself since the late 1980s. Mahathir has obliged by forcing out two major Umno factions in 10 years: the one led by Razaleigh in 1988 and the other thrust upon Anwar in 1998.
Besides, there exist not one or two, but three precedents for coalition-building as the pathway to progress in Malaysian politics. In 1957, the Alliance of Umno, the Malayan Chinese Association (MCA) and the Malayan Indian Congress (MIC) led Malaya to independence. In 1969, the coalition of Lim Chong Eu's old MCA faction, former Labour Party stalwarts such as Tan Chee Khoon, and trade unionists such as V. David allowed Gerakan Rakyat Malaysia to win the Penang state election. And BN was formed when Abdul Razak enlarged the Alliance into a super coalition to implement the New Economic Policy
The way out of Malaysia's political impasse is to erect a bulwark against an unreformed regime. The way forward is offered by the Barisan Alternatif's multiethnic, multireligious, and NGO-supported, four-party coalition. With only a year's cooperation, the BA's collective leadership has worked and stayed together to produce a "Common Manifesto", a "Budget Strategy" and an electoral power-sharing plan.
This second coalition -- comprising PAS, DAP, Parti Rakyat Malaysia (PRM), and Parti Keadilan Nasional (Keadilan), the last-named being led by Wan Azizah Wan Ismail, Anwar's wife -- is naturally rainbow-hued, not ideologically monolithic. It is unrealistic to expect otherwise. Anyone who wants PAS to drop its "Islamic state" goal and DAP its "Malaysian Malaysia" ideology as a precondition for coalition is either victim or party to a ploy to get them to drop dead -- while Umno sheds nothing of its claim to "Malay dominance".
Malaysian society may have been saved from the "balkanisation" that has occurred elsewhere by its periodically renewed experience of coalition, inspired by a collective intuition that diversity in a plural society must be more than a virtue. Diversity is a necessity that invents social and political experiments.
Yet no one should take the BA's experiment for granted. While the BA endeavours to realise a two-coalition system it must contend with those who are quite ready to have one-party rule in all but name. The Election Commission has excluded 680,000 new voters, registered before May, from the electoral roll for the Nov 29 election. The campaign period is virtually the shortest in Malaysian electoral practice. In just eight days, the BA must overcome police restrictions on rallies, bureaucratic denial of public meeting places, media blackouts, non-transparent deployment of postal ballots, and all-out money politics.
Still it is far better that the BA conducts its experiment now, when both a tentative economic recovery and popular dissent clamour for prudent management, good governance, a vibrant civil society and independent institutions. Less benign conditions later would obstruct genuine dialogue among potential coalition partners.
No one should be shortsighted about the risk and opportunity presented by this election. Malaysian society today has no risk of ethnic violence or religious extremism. The BA does not threaten secular government. The BN has undermined constitutional democratic government. The events of July 1997 and September 1998 have unwittingly created an opportunity for the BA to commence a process of meaningful economic, political and institutional reform. A two-thirds majority for BN will abort that process.
KHOO BOO TEIK, Visiting Fellow, Asia Research Centre, Murdoch University, Perth, Australia, is the author of Paradoxes of Mahathirism: An Intellectual Biography of Mahathir Mohamad.
Now Mahathir, having cocked a sneer at those who predicted his capital controls, currency peg and semi-autarkic reflation would be disastrous, wants to cock another sneer at those who hold that economic mismanagement must bring political accounting.
Mahathir's dismissal and prosecution of his deputy, Anwar Ibrahim, have plunged the political system into a deep crisis since September last year. Yet Mahathir thinks his ruling Barisan Nasional can preserve its two-thirds parliamentary majority at the 10th general elections on Monday.
Whether or not they share Mahathir's confidence, some analysts evidently believe that a comprehensive BN defeat of the new opposition coalition, Barisan Alternatif (Alternative Front) will close the "Anwar affair" and secure the leadership succession essential to long-term stability.
Malaysian political history, however, indicates that another two-thirds win by BN will not produce long-term stability.
As if it were its birthright, the BN has held a two-thirds majority since its formation in 1974. But this near monopoly of power, which goes beyond the requirements of stable government, never immunised the BN's dominant party, the United Malays National Organisation (Umno) from chronic factionalism. The Anwar affair is only the latest symptom.
In the mid-1970s, the late Hussein Onn prosecuted Harun Idris, the formerly powerful mentri besar of Selangor. In retaliation, Umno's old guard conducted a witch-hunt for "communists" within the party, causing the arrest of several figures close to Abdul Razak and nearly ensnaring Mahathir. Then Musa Hitam and Razaleigh Hamzah fought desperate battles in 1981 and 1984 for the Umno deputy presidency. Following that, a temporary Razaleigh-Musa alliance nearly ousted Mahathir from power.
The struggle between Mahathir's "Team A" and Razaleigh's "Team B" split Umno and led to its deregistration in 1988. The struggle carried over into the 1990 and 1995 elections as the fight between Mahathir's "Umno Baru" and Razaleigh's Parti Semangat 46. In between, Anwar led a "Wawasan Team" of younger leaders who displaced Ghafar Baba and Abdullah Ahmad Badawi, among others, from the party's leadership during the 1993 party election.
For 25 years, therefore, the principal source of political instability in Malaysia was not Parti Islam SeMalaysia (PAS) with its supposed religious extremism or the Democratic Action Party (DAP) with its alleged ethnic chauvinism, but Umno, whose gathering implosion continually undermined its self-acclaimed role of providing "hegemonic stability" to the entire political system.
Those who refuse to acknowledge this may insist that the present crisis will be resolved if Mahathir obtains another two-thirds win, wraps up the Anwar affair, and restores "business as usual". In fact, Umno cannot look forward to "politics as usual". The party's politics can no longer be conceived in terms of isolated problems of policy differences, personality clashes, power struggles or leadership succession. Rather, Umno is fast approaching a state of systemic failure.
The party is effectively trapped -- unable to recover the idealistic Malay nationalism which defined its historic mission, but unwilling to cleanse its "corporate mission" of in-built cronyism and money politics. Hence (poignantly, given Mahathir's "Look East" policy), Umno reminds one of Japan's Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) before the latter was torn apart in 1993 by rampant factionalism. There was a difference in sequencing: LDP's crisis preceded, while Umno's followed, an economic crisis. Otherwise, neither LDP nor Umno undertook reforms to treat the intertwined economic and political afflictions of Japan Inc. and Malaysia Inc. respectively
Meanwhile, a second coalition has been asking to be born. Or, to use the terminology supplied by DAP Secretary-General Lim Kit Siang during the 1990 general election, Malaysian politics must be transformed into a two-coalition system that institutionalises pluralist, balanced and fair electoral competition.
There is a pragmatic reason for a two-coalition system. No opposition party can singly challenge Umno, let alone the 14-member BN. Parties such as PAS and DAP must "hang together" or "hang separately". Thus, a putative second coalition, always ready to ally with Umno dissidents, has suggested itself since the late 1980s. Mahathir has obliged by forcing out two major Umno factions in 10 years: the one led by Razaleigh in 1988 and the other thrust upon Anwar in 1998.
Besides, there exist not one or two, but three precedents for coalition-building as the pathway to progress in Malaysian politics. In 1957, the Alliance of Umno, the Malayan Chinese Association (MCA) and the Malayan Indian Congress (MIC) led Malaya to independence. In 1969, the coalition of Lim Chong Eu's old MCA faction, former Labour Party stalwarts such as Tan Chee Khoon, and trade unionists such as V. David allowed Gerakan Rakyat Malaysia to win the Penang state election. And BN was formed when Abdul Razak enlarged the Alliance into a super coalition to implement the New Economic Policy
The way out of Malaysia's political impasse is to erect a bulwark against an unreformed regime. The way forward is offered by the Barisan Alternatif's multiethnic, multireligious, and NGO-supported, four-party coalition. With only a year's cooperation, the BA's collective leadership has worked and stayed together to produce a "Common Manifesto", a "Budget Strategy" and an electoral power-sharing plan.
This second coalition -- comprising PAS, DAP, Parti Rakyat Malaysia (PRM), and Parti Keadilan Nasional (Keadilan), the last-named being led by Wan Azizah Wan Ismail, Anwar's wife -- is naturally rainbow-hued, not ideologically monolithic. It is unrealistic to expect otherwise. Anyone who wants PAS to drop its "Islamic state" goal and DAP its "Malaysian Malaysia" ideology as a precondition for coalition is either victim or party to a ploy to get them to drop dead -- while Umno sheds nothing of its claim to "Malay dominance".
Malaysian society may have been saved from the "balkanisation" that has occurred elsewhere by its periodically renewed experience of coalition, inspired by a collective intuition that diversity in a plural society must be more than a virtue. Diversity is a necessity that invents social and political experiments.
Yet no one should take the BA's experiment for granted. While the BA endeavours to realise a two-coalition system it must contend with those who are quite ready to have one-party rule in all but name. The Election Commission has excluded 680,000 new voters, registered before May, from the electoral roll for the Nov 29 election. The campaign period is virtually the shortest in Malaysian electoral practice. In just eight days, the BA must overcome police restrictions on rallies, bureaucratic denial of public meeting places, media blackouts, non-transparent deployment of postal ballots, and all-out money politics.
Still it is far better that the BA conducts its experiment now, when both a tentative economic recovery and popular dissent clamour for prudent management, good governance, a vibrant civil society and independent institutions. Less benign conditions later would obstruct genuine dialogue among potential coalition partners.
No one should be shortsighted about the risk and opportunity presented by this election. Malaysian society today has no risk of ethnic violence or religious extremism. The BA does not threaten secular government. The BN has undermined constitutional democratic government. The events of July 1997 and September 1998 have unwittingly created an opportunity for the BA to commence a process of meaningful economic, political and institutional reform. A two-thirds majority for BN will abort that process.
KHOO BOO TEIK, Visiting Fellow, Asia Research Centre, Murdoch University, Perth, Australia, is the author of Paradoxes of Mahathirism: An Intellectual Biography of Mahathir Mohamad.
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