An alliance made by necessity

COMMENT | The late Barry Wain was right.

In 1984, when he first encountered Dr Mahathir Mohamad and Anwar Ibrahim, the New Zealand journalist who covered Southeast Asia for the weekly Far Eastern Economic Review and later for the daily, Asian Wall Street Journal, both now defunct, predicted that the impact of the two Malaysian politicians on their country's future would be pivotal.

Yesterday, the prescience of that prediction was confirmed when the former allies turned bitter antagonists - and now expedient allies - combined forces in pursuit of an objective they reckon they cannot achieve separately.

This is the termination of the hegemon Umno's now 61-year lease on Malaysian governmental life.

This is a span which, if extended at the fast approaching 14th general election (GE14), would almost certainly go on to overtake in longevity the tenure of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) of Mexico, holder of the world record of 71 uninterrupted years of national governance.

PRI's tenure (1929-2000) in one of Latin America's largest countries has had disastrous long-term consequences for Mexico; GE14's probable extension of Umno's lease would have catastrophic effects on Malaysia.

For that reason the Mahathir-Anwar compact, announced at the Pakatan Harapan convention in Shah Alam yesterday, is not only in the national interest; it has, as support of its necessity, the wisdom of a couple of political maxims to commend it.

These are that politics is indeed the art of the possible and that the interests of its principals can be depended upon to override whatever enmities happen to obtain among them...