A glimpse of what might have been

The marriage of three ideologically strange bedfellows (PKR, Pas and DAP) was always dubious to begin with.

John Teo, NST

MANY who voted for the opposition in the 2013 General Election (GE13) did so with eyes wide open. It was not so much because they felt Pakatan deserved their votes. The marriage of three ideologically strange bedfellows (PKR, Pas and DAP) was always dubious to begin with, and most saw through it.

Rather, these voters believed that after more than five decades of the Umno-led Barisan Nasional, it was time for a change of national government, any change.

These voters knew that Pakatan was, and apparently still is, given ructions in it over the fate of the Selangor menteri besar post, united by little more than common antipathy towards BN.

There wasn’t even a shadow national government in place, much less a government in waiting to take over from BN.

We have only now been told that there was not even a Pakatan consensus in place prior to GE13 as to who would have been nominated as prime minister had Pakatan secured a majority in the Dewan Rakyat. This begs the question whether voters had been misled into believing that opposition leader Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim would have been prime minister had Pakatan won GE13.

Pakatan, as it now turns out, has been exploiting popular sentiments for political change by keeping voters in the dark over such a vital matter.

Not that it had been transparent in presenting a credible alternative governing platform to voters either.

No matter, the opposition had been confident, and some within it arrogantly so, that voters would gamble on it simply by its waving a marriage certificate.

Indeed, Pakatan was almost proven right in its confidence.

The popular sentiment of the opposition-voting electorate then had been that while Pakatan might have been far from perfect going into GE13, there was nothing wrong with giving it the benefit of the doubt.

If that benefit was to be betrayed, so went the popular reasoning, Pakatan could always be voted out come GE14.

Many were also persuaded by the argument that Selangor and Penang had been well governed under their Pakatan-led administrations after GE12.

There was, thus, no traction by those who had argued then that awarding the electoral mandate to an undeserving national Pakatan coalition would prove to be politically disastrous.

When it was argued that the demographics in Penang were representative of those obtaining nationally and, therefore, how that state performs under Pakatan cannot be a fair indicator of how Pakatan would perform nationally, a plausible counter-argument was that Selangor’s demographics more closely resembled the national ethnic breakdown.

If that were so, we now have a glimpse of what might have been, had Pakatan captured Putrajaya in GE13.

Voters would have jumped from the frying pan of disenchantment over uninterrupted rule by BN into the fire of likely political paralysis, as PKR, Pas and DAP jockeyed for advantage in divvying up the spoils of national government.

There is always something to be said about the idea of power sharing between the three parties.

Translating worthy ideas into practical ones when faced with the nitty-gritty of governing in a coalition has never been easy. Governing by consensus never sounded anything but good, but in practical terms could well mean getting nothing done.

Could that be the reason why an otherwise decent and upright leader such as Tan Sri Abdul Khalid Ibrahim ended up being accused of authoritarian tendencies and governing Selangor without the benefit of consultation with even his own partymates?

There is a question being asked, by activist Datin Paduka Marina Mahathir, that if politicians were for the people, why were the politicians dividing the people?

In Selangor, perhaps the answer can be gleaned. It is that politics and especially the democratic kind we all seem to favour may be divisive.

Thus, a thin line exists in politics between effective governance and paralysis brought about by political discord in a ruling coalition, never mind that between two opposing ones.

Selangor is, thankfully, the nation’s richest state. It can probably afford a lengthy spate of ineffectual governance. Not so the nation, where political paralysis may only sharpen the many dangerous and unavoidable pre-existing divides, with all the explosive social, economic and security implications they can entail.