Pribumi’s Catch-22
It is inconceivable Pribumi can muster greater moral legitimacy when it is a near copy of the team it seeks to defeat.
Praba Ganesan, The Malay Mail Online
Pribumi is dead in the water. Last weekend’s mayhem will repeat, and the race supremacist party is set to fall on its own sword.
An elaborate hara-kiri is inevitable as the raison d’être to kick out Umno by offering itself as a better avatar of Umno was always sheer loco.
Consider this.
A government in power, and a crowded loose coalition of those who were in government, are not in parity when stacked against each other.
So when the Johnny-come-lately tries the same tricks or its progenitor’s when he was in office, it falls flat because Pribumi does not have the state’s machineries, open support from corporate Malaysia or adequate access to the masses.
It has not dawned on sycophants that Mahathir Mohamad has never been against the government — British Malaya or Umno administrations — till now.
He’s been part of it, expelled from it, recruited by it, challenged within it, revered by it and finally isolated by it in retirement. But he never was against it as a sworn enemy.
With the gloves off, Mahathir is in new territory, where former underlings need not appease the old codger, instead free to unleash their venom.
Fox-hunting comes to mind.
For the armed horse-rider assisted by foxhounds, the exercise appears challenging — respectable enough — with fair chance of success, though it’s mightily different for the prey. The fox is compromised from all sides and success wishful thinking, as it only seeks survival.
Mahathir has never been hunted, as he’s always been the hunter.
Spitefully, I’d chastise, “Hunting the weak has never been honourable, Dr M. You’ve made it natural in our national mind-set by repetition. These opponents of yours today are only doing what is natural to them, to win before the game begins.”
The charm offensive
What is available then?
Neo-fascist governments are resilient. They are death-stars.
They rise on populism and destroy critics, mercilessly so.
They are not defeated by a softer version of themselves, like a lite-version.
This is where I am bemused with strategists articulating how Pribumi fills a gap in challenging Umno in the rural heartlands.
For, they ask a presumably prejudiced electorate, to switch sides — from one “feed-the-prejudice party” to another “feed-the-prejudice party” — on account the new entity has Mahathir on board.
The strategy is as backward as the politics of the two parties.
