The Selangor Pakatan crisis

Yet Pakatan was always, in its strategic concept, a necessarily a faltering vehicle. An idea that, in the face of undeniably enormous difficulties, was always more appealing than it was coherent.

Clive Kessler, Malay Mail Online

Without becoming too tedious, it will be possible, I hope, to remind everybody of what I have been saying for years, and with some considerable — if at times unwelcome — emphasis since the years of the agonisingly long “lead-up”, or “phoney war”, preceding  GE13.

Namely, that the idea of a “popular front”, of an all anti-BN forces opposition bloc, may seem very nice (and, let us give credit where credit is due, only the consummately agile and mercurial Anwar could ever have produced such a pact, could have negotiated such a thing into being).

Created it? Yes. But, by its nature, his is a creation that is hard to sustain.

Hard to sustain because it lacks coherence, plausibility, deep grounding.

It may work — as, necessarily, it was been designed to work under Malaysia’s dubious “first past the post” electoral system — to mean and help ensure, so long as it might last, that opposition parties will not compete against one another, will not split the opposition vote by offering rival candidates on election day.

But a “no competing at the polls on polling day” agreement is not a political coalition, still less a common political direction, agenda and identity — a solid opposition “front”.

Pakatan is and has always been little more than a “no enemies on polling day” tactical pact, a “pragmatic” measure.

Pakatan is and remains an improbable and inchoate combination (or “loose assemblage”), not an amalgam, of mutually contradictory and incompatible elements.

That kind of vehicle can get you “only so far” on a common political journey; it may initially offer the prospect of some pleasing progress, of exciting forward momentum.

But when it encounters its limits as it must eventually do (and now has), its motley passengers can then find themselves stranded in “mid-journey”.

It has been clear for years that Umno/BN’s main survival and domination-restoration strategy has been to place unbearable pressure on the opposition as a coalition, and especially upon PAS.

It has mounted a targeted effort to play upon, to play up and amplify, three crucial inherent “fault lines”, three areas of serious, even major, vulnerability for PAS.

First, within Pakatan, between the component parties and their respective leaderships, especially between PAS and the other two partner parties.

Second, within PAS, between the old, or “hard-line” ulama leadership and tendencies and the so-called new “moderate”, professional elements.

And third, within “Malay society” and “the peninsular Malay sociopolitical imagination” more broadly — so long as PAS does not revert to supporting Umno on Islamic-Malay grounds — to build upon, and further build up, mistrust between the mass of rural Malay voters and the PAS leadership, and thereby upon PAS as a party generally.

It is those PAS voters, and the party’s grip upon their devoted allegiance, that have always been the key to Malaysian electoral politics.

Those rural supporters have long been PAS’ reliable “vote-bank”. They have provided PAS with a powerful source of political strength and legitimacy that PAS could amply “harvest” at Umno’s expense.

PAS’ ability, in that way, to deny Umno the mass Malay support that it yearned for, and the ensuing political credibility that it demanded, came at Umno’s great political cost.

That ability, its capacity to deny Umno incontrovertible and ultimate Malay credibility, has been the basis of PAS’ political continuity and endurance.

That was the main challenge that Umno faced, long before Pakatan Rakyat was ever dreamed of — going back at least to 1959 — and it still continued to pose that central challenge to Umno after the Pakatan compact, with PAS as one of its members, was fashioned.

In the Pakatan coalition PKR was to be “neutralised” by the continuing, unrelenting personal, political and legal pressure on Anwar.

The DAP and its leaders were to be marginalised, stigmatised and “scandalised” as implacable enemies of the supposed “immanent destiny” of “Ketuanan Melayu”, the idea of Malaysia (regardless of what the Merdeka Constitution might hold) as a land primarily of and for Malays.

But the crucial “squeeze play” in the Umno “play-book” was always that which was directed, in those three different forms or “prongs”, against PAS.

Umno’s anti-PAS operation has been a masterful exercise in “wedge politics”.

We are now seeing that overall strategy come to fruition, and for two main reasons.

First, because of the enormous pressure that Umno has been able to place upon the Pakatan coalition, especially upon PAS; and second, because of the inherent weakness, frailty and fragility of the Pakatan compact itself, especially so far as PAS’s continued participation and consent is concerned.

That was a weakness that has been amplified by the undue, at times uncritical and even delusional, hope that Pakatan leaders and followers often have placed upon their all too “pragmatic” and limited arrangements for political, mainly electoral, co-operation.

Yet Pakatan was always, in its strategic concept, a necessarily a faltering vehicle. An idea that, in the face of undeniably enormous difficulties, was always more appealing than it was coherent.

It was a frail and fragile and all too “pragmatic” an alliance because it had to be that way.

It was weak because it lacked real substance and content. And it lacked that plausible content because keeping PAS “on-side”, and inside the coalition’s accommodating tent, required that such questions, awkward and potentially divisive questions of political substance and content, be avoided. Or dubiously “finessed”. The hudud issue, for example.

So, as events have unfolded lately, the long predictable has now become likely, even imminent.

One may, if one so chooses, find this situation, and being in it, unpalatable and unpleasant.

But one cannot reasonably find it surprising.

It has been “on the cards” all along.

Even if a way is found to manage this current impasse over the position of Selangor Mentri Besar, to patch up some technically artful but all too fanciful compromise, the underlying problem will remain.

Can Pakatan ever recover?

You have to be a counterfactual optimist, and one with a very poor sense of the realities of politics, to imagine so.

*Clive Kessler is Emeritus Professor of Sociology & Anthropology at The University of New South Wales, Sydney.