Thoughts on the elections, Part 2

Government and opposition in a democratic culture.

But a democratic culture has yet to develop in this country to put relationship between government and opposition on a mutually more respectful footing. Perhaps the semblance of checkmate and balance of power that emerged from this election may yet spawn such a culture. Let’s hope it will. In any event, BN now finds itself on the opposition side in five state assemblies. It must adapt itself to this new role and relate to the non-BN coalition state governments in a proper manner, in the same way that it should expect the PDP to play the role of loyal opposition to the federal government and seven BN state governments in a proper manner.

Both the BN and the PDP group have a lot to learn. The process of democratic acculturation must take place, starting from the acceptance by both sides that government and opposition are two sides of the same coin in the democratic system. Some old attitudes and bad habits have got to go. The BN leadership should take the lead because when BN ruled supreme, it treated the opposition with disdain, like outcasts, a nuisance to be tolerated but ignored as irrelevant. Will it continue to relate to the opposition in this way? Now that the erstwhile opposition is in power in some states, will they treat the BN across the table in the way that they had been treated when they were at the receiving end? The new generation of voters who put PDP grouping in power probably disapprove of such tit-for-tat treatment. If the younger sets are imbued with the democratic ideals, they would certainly recognize the opposition as having a rightful and designated place in the system.

The quality of leadership

If there are lessons to be learned from the voters’ harsh message in this election, they must begin with a soul-searching appraisal of the quality of leadership. That will most of all put the spotlight on the decision to dissolve Parliament a whole year before the 2004 mandate was due to expire, and in the wake of so many unhappy events: the Hindraf caper, the Bersih protest marches, the Lingam Tape scandal, the spate of unsolved murders, children going missing, the persistent allegations of corruption, the steep rise in fuel prices and cost of living, to name only a few.

Despite all that it is difficult to comprehend Pak Lah’s thinking when he told Al-Jazeera in an interview just before the polls that it was the "best time" to go back to the people. It seems clear that the BN leadership had failed to read the writing on the wall. Or perhaps, as Mahathir said, having the election sooner or later would not have made much difference.

Was it a collective decision? Najib Abdul Razak said collective decision-making was part of the BN’s culture, a statement the PM readily concurred and echoed. Yet how many times have the people in this country not heard our leaders from the DPM down say that they leave such and such decisions for the PM alone to make? They say it so often as if it is such a great virtue to leave decision-making solely to the party chief, giving the impression that leaders of component parties have totally abdicated their say in any matter. It seems that in this country the top leader is a superman who can hand down all major decisions to a doting nation who would then sing his praises in chorus. Happily for our PM, when wrong decisions have been made, everybody would rally to his defence, claiming that these were collective decisions when they obviously were not. How leaders in the developed world wish to have such forgiving and unquestioning underlings!

Learning a new culture

If the election has ushered in a new era as many have hoped it has, the era should bring on a new culture, a culture that calls for accountability for decisions that leaders make. That calls for a culture that abhors hero worship and the personality cult. It is such behaviour that leads to autocratic rule because a dictator does not appear suddenly out of nowhere. It is one who evolves slowly on a high pedestal. We have had leaders who fit the bill in the past, and come what may, for better or for worse, it seems the BN crowd are grooming another. Pak Lah may not be quite that kind of person, but those who hover around him seem intent on making him one.

Many people in this country regard the new political development with excitement. For 50 years the political landscape has hardly changed or come under any threat of change, save the disturbances of May 1969. That led to the draconian legislation to forestall any recurrence of the race riots. Other measures such as gerrymandering here and there put Umno in an unassailable position such that elections had all but become a mere formality, a means to legitimize power that invariably fell into Umno hands. Within Umno itself, the practice of exempting the president and second-in-command from party election sets the stage for the PM to stay in power for as long as he has goodies too hand out and for as long as he likes. Other than that, in the 40 years since 1969 race and religion have dominated the country’s political life and they have been the constant factors in the equation that have always yielded the 2/3 majority victory for the Umno-led BN.

Unexpectedly, these hitherto constant factors (race and religion) became variables in the country’s 12th general election on March 8, 2008. That bucked the 40-year trend. Is this the end of Malaysia’s race-based politics dominated by Umno? One swallow may not make summer, but if the conservative Muslims in the country’s Malay heartland could find a common ground with the other races and threw their support behind Chinese and Indian candidates in DAP and multi-racial PKR, that is a ground breaking development. If the diehard ethnocentric Chinese voters similarly had no qualms giving their wholesale support for Islamist PAS and Malay dominant PKR, that is a paradigm shift. On the face of it, something might be stirring in these voters’ minds or, more important, psyches, that tells them that their destiny is inextricably linked to that of others in this country, and it is theirs to fashion to suit their own circumstances in a complex and increasingly globalised world, and not one to be shaped by inherited suspicions, fears, distrust and prejudices.

A minefield of sensitivities

In a country long bedeviled by ethnic polarisation, what happened in this election has all the makings of a quantum leap to a future less fixated on ethnicity and religion. But there is no cause for euphoria.

Much depends on how the five new state governments cope in their respective states. Like the PBS state government before them, they will be watched more than the Umno-led BN had ever been watched before, and every mistake they make will be amplified and exaggerated to grotesque proportions. They have found themselves in a dangerous minefield littered with unresolved problems and vested interests. They have to relate with various personalities who may be powerful movers and shakers in their own right. They have to mind their steps as they pick their way among politicians and big timers of various descriptions, and of course, the civil servants with their set habits and loyalties, who may be neither civil, neutral nor obedient, doing their own things on the side as before.

As we try to fathom the long term implications of the country’s 12th general election it is important that we do not view it purely as a partisan struggle between BN and the rest on which we take one side or the other. BN has been found wanting in many respects, but no sane Malaysian would deny it some credit for Malaysia’s great progress up too now.

The quest for a two-party system

What is at stake is not Umno or BN or the PDP in whatever political front that they may organise themselves into later. Those who voted against BN in this election did not do so to destroy Umno and the parties aligned to it only to replace BN with the "Barisan Alternative" in another one-party system. There is no sense in removing one dictatorial entity to install another, for left to its own devices without any effective opposition Barisan Alternative will itself become just as corrupt and dictatorial. What we want is a strong opposition to BN in a two-party system, able to be the next government if the voters so choose.

What is at stake is the system that we must preserve for the future. If there are good trusted leaders today they will not last forever. There is no guarantee that those who emerge in the future will not change character the way some despots well-known in history changed character after they had consolidated their power. What is extremely disturbing is that they all had doting followers who kissed the ground they walked on.

A leader may surface one day who may turn out to be a brutal autocratic leader to preside over a sycophantic nation such as we have seen in our own days. How sad if our children or grandchildren should live in this kind of fearful environment with no means of throwing out the tyrant, all because we today foolishly imagine that the supreme leader will not mutate beyond recognition or will not become a puppet of conspirators around him, and throw away all means of constitutional remedy to rid the nation of this scourge. We need to preserve a system that will not allow an unworthy leader to hang on to power for as long as he/she wishes.

We will not find that means of remedy in the politics of acquiescence in a one-party system such as had existed before the 12th general election. While it may be too early to say that the DAP-PKR-PAS coalition has ushered in a two-party system, people who look to the future are excited because it is a tentative step in that direction. It is a development that even Umno can welcome, as much as all component parties of BN can welcome. Who would deny their own children, grandchildren and descendants further down the line a means to install a government of their choice in a world as uncertain as the future?"

Thoughts on the elections, Part 1

STAN YEE is a retired government officer and an off and on newspaper columnist.