Day of reckoning (UPDATED with Chinese Translation)

ARCHIVES 2010

By MT Webmaster On Apr 30, 2010

Pakatan Rakyat depends on Barisan Nasional’s failure to succeed. This is a not a good and safe way to succeed. We make it only if Barisan Nasional does not. It is like winning by default. I need you to falter so that I can cross the finishing line first. If you don’t then I lose. If you falter then I win.

THE CORRIDORS OF POWER

Raja Petra Kamarudin

Bridget Welsh wrote an article called Lost in Hulu: Lessons for Pakatan, which was published in Malaysiakini today. I am not able to publish the full article but I have published the concluding part of that article.

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Party of defectors, not leaders

Convincing voters that it can govern effectively is vital for the opposition’s future. This starts with the leadership of the opposition. Nationally, Pakatan has to come to terms that the attacks on Anwar Ibrahim have had their impact.

The opposition leader does not have the same level of popularity of 2008. In part, this was the product of his loss of credibility over the Sept. 16 affair that lingers in the minds of voters. In part, this has to do with questions associated with the Sodomy II trial, although the majority of the electorate see this as a political ploy.

It nevertheless has cast a shadow over the future direction of the leadership of Pakatan. Voters want to be assured that the coalition they vote for has clear leadership and direction.

The major issue in this campaign was the impact of the defections. People supposedly loyal to Anwar, such at Hulu Selangor’s Dr Halili Rahmat, people who were touted by Anwar to be important PKR leaders and personal friends openly joined the other side. This raises questions about Anwar’s leadership that have to be addressed in order to win the confidence of the electorate.

PKR is becoming perceived as the party of defectors, not leaders. The defections also affected campaigning as they spilled over into weakening the local machinery resulting in the party relying heavily on outsiders to run the campaign.

Are the rats leaving a sinking ship? Or is the party finding out who is willing to commit to real reforms in government and stick with the fight? While these may be true, the impact of the defections was especially damaging in Malay areas, and had broader resonance.

Pakatan needs own identity

More fundamentally, Pakatan needs to come up with a programme for the future in government. Malaysian voters are pragmatic and want direction on the part of their leaders. Nationally, Prime Minister Najib Razak has adopted economic reform as his own platform. He has usurped the position as the reformer, at least symbolically.

Pakatan has yet to showcase a new set of ideas to address the current challenges. It has yet to engage with how the Najib leadership in BN has evolved and is evolving. Personal attacks on Najib are not adequate to win votes. They need a clear programme and direction, based on being in government at the state level and as a potential government nationally. It is no longer enough to be different from BN. Pakatan needs its own identity that voters can connect to.

Pakatan may have lost in Hulu Selangor. The bigger challenge is to make sure that it has not lost its direction. The by-election showed that the opposition is learning – it gained ground towards the end – but faces challenges in communication, leadership and identity.

If it wants to win power nationally, it has to take bold steps to engage the electorate and current political conditions. To avoid getting lost and further losses, Pakatan has to avoid internal blame and recognised that voters want change to be more than symbolic.

DR BRIDGET WELSH is associate professor of political science at Singapore Management University. She can be reached at [email protected]

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The first part of Bridget’s article, which I did not publish, touches on the weaknesses of PKR’s campaign in Hulu Selangor — the poor coordination, bad strategy, inferior logistics and whatnot. Basically, many writers and news reports over the last few days said the same thing. So we need not talk about all that. What I want to focus on, instead, is the conclusion of Bridget’s article, which I published above.

I have said almost the same thing many times over the last few years. But I stopped nagging because many Malaysia Today readers whacked me and said I was being unfair. “How can you compare just a year or two of Pakatan Rakyat’s rule to almost 50 years of Barisan Nasional rule?” was the common argument. Give Pakatan Rakyat time, they pleaded.

I countered by saying that better I whack now before serious damage is done than I whack later, after the damage is so severe it is beyond repair. But no, the argument was still: I am being unfair and should not expect too much too soon and that I should give Pakatan Rakyat time to get its act together.

Sure, I am prepared to give them time. But are the voters also prepared to do the same? Are the voters prepared to give Pakatan Rakyat one term to get its act together and the second term to show what it can do? And only if after the second term nothing happens will the voters kick Pakatan Rakyat out in the third term?

I worry that the voters will not be so patient. They might judge Pakatan Rakyat by what it has achieved in its first term in office and if they are not convinced that Pakatan Rakyat has proven to be a better government then they would kick Pakatan Rakyat out come the next election.

I agree there are many reasons why elections are won or lost. Fraud, gerrymandering, bribery, threats, blackmail, one-sided mainstream media, racism, the charisma/popularity of the candidate, bad/good strategy, sufficiency of funding, efficiency of logistics, etc., all contribute to the loss or win. Some factors are beyond our control, others, within our control.

And one factor that is within our control, and if we fail to do this then we have only ourselves to blame, is the confidence of the voters. That, only we can achieve and no amount of external factors can erase or enhance the confidence that the voters have on the party they are about to vote for.

In March 2008, the voters did not vote for Pakatan Rakyat because they were confident that Pakatan Rakyat would make a better government. In fact, they did not know and did not care. They just voted Pakatan Rakyat because they hated Barisan Nasional and they either wanted Barisan Nasional out of office or they wanted to teach Barisan Nasional a lesson in the hope that Barisan Nasional would change and in its place would emerge a new Barisan Nasional — which means if that happens they might go back to Barisan Nasional.

Pakatan Rakyat needs to win not because of the failure of Barisan Nasional. Pakatan Rakyat needs to win because it is a winner. But the voters do not see Pakatan Rakyat as a winner. They just see Barisan Nasional as a bigger loser. So better a smaller loser, Pakatan Rakyat, than a bigger loser, Barisan Nasional. But this still means that Pakatan Rakyat is seen as a loser, only a smaller one at that.

Do we want to succeed because we are viewed as the lesser of the two evils? That is currently what the voters think of Pakatan Rakyat, the lesser of the two evils, but still an evil nevertheless.

It is time that Pakatan Rakyat projects itself as a winner. Pakatan Rakyat needs to convince the voters that it is the better government, not that Barisan Nasional is even worse.

That is what I have been trying to say for some time. And now that the Hulu Selangor voters have spoken, maybe I should say it again, in spite of the anger the readers are going to demonstrate after this with allegations that I am not being fair and am not giving Pakatan Rakyat enough time and so on.

I am prepared to give Pakatan Rakyat more time. But are the voters also prepared to do the same?

In the days when Pakatan Rakyat used to be called Barisan Alternatif, they had a shadow cabinet with ‘ministers’ and ‘deputy ministers’ plus ‘cabinet committees’. And the shadow cabinet came out with ‘national policies’ that touched on education, health, the economy, national integration, poverty eradication, minimum wage, workers’ issues, women’s issues, foreign policy, defence, and much more. And on many an occasion the opposition policies were far superior to the government policies.

Every year, Barisan Alternatif would table its annual budget that put the government’s budge to shame. If the government were to adopt the opposition’s proposal to the budget many issues could have been addressed. In fact, there were a few occasions when the government actually copied Barisan Alternatif’s budget because some of the ideas were indeed quite good.

We could do it ten years ago after the 1999 general election. And that time we had less brains in parliament on top of that. So why can’t we still do that? Now we have even more brainy people in parliament compared to 1999. Or maybe Pakatan Rakyat feels it need not be as clever as it was ten years ago because the voters will still support it come hell or high water?

I would beg to differ. Pakatan Rakyat takes the voters for granted and assumes that it has the voters’ blind support at its peril. The voters are not dumb. They know what good governance means. And Pakatan Rakyat has not been able to convince the voters that a vote for Pakatan Rakyat means a vote for good governance. It has only been able to convince the voters that Pakatan Rakyat may not be the best, but Barisan Nasional is worse.

Translated into Chinese at: http://ccliew.blogspot.com/2010/05/blog-post_01.html