Reboot political parties
(MMO) – Umno, Pribumi and Perkasa are interchangeable and members can swap parties as and when, depending on who’s leading it.
All the Barisan Nasional (BN) parties are soul-searching. Each find themselves with internal turmoil, as members exit and their existence questioned.
Pakatan Harapan has won, but the win is no indictment of the strength of the respective parties’ membership — values, structure, streamlines and political philosophy.
Those who flee BN now, and those in the past who have fled from Pakatan after the usual election defeat, underline the point that political membership is not ideological-based in Malaysia presently.
This election result offers all these parties — Pakatan and BN — the opportunity to revisit their own purpose and actions.
They should oblige, because it will ensure the long-term relevance of their parties, and second, more importantly, resilience when they are defeated in elections.
There are these to consider in the process to renew, if they choose to do so.
Ideology
Perhaps asking for cohesive and comprehensive philosophies would be overwhelming when their histories are factored.
All BN parties are communal based. They seek to champion their community, meaning they are inherently exclusive and bigoted about segments outside their spectrum. Their nationalism is expedient and fundamentally hypocritical because nation comes after their community.
Even if Khairy Jamaluddin wins the Umno presidency and duly unifies all BN parties into one — or re-order Umno as Barisan Nasional — the new entity still lacks a raison d’être.
PKR is the amalgamation of the old Keadilan and centre-left Parti Rakyat Malaysia. The parti massa line lingers but has not been investigated by the membership. No party leader, including Anwar Ibrahim, postulates the political spine of the party. As the biggest winner inside Pakatan it can back the numbers with a stomach for discourse within it.
The prime minister is from Pribumi, but the party is only a mirror of Umno. Members of the old party bent on defeating it in the polls. It has. Does that mean moving forward it subsumes Umno or merges with it? When it comes to a group political identity, Mahathir Mohamad is probably an infant, so the party has to delve into this central riddle.
Otherwise, Umno, Pribumi and Perkasa are interchangeable and members can swap parties as and when, depending on who’s leading it. It is reasonable to state that Pribumi is a temporary vehicle and requires a rationalisation to have a future. Otherwise it is trapped as a communal party.
DAP has “initiated” measures to grow the Malaysia inside it, but there are main arteries it bypasses in its own-fashioned open-heart surgery to allow the party a heartbeat synchronised to the shifting demography. The intent can’t succeed without courage to lose traditional members. To win new friends by lying to both them and old friends, is a recipe for disaster.
