Pakatan Harapan Should Negotiate Seat Allocations NOW
Liew Chin Tong used to brag that Pakatan Harapan had managed to settle seat allocations between the four parties a few months ahead of GE14, touting how unprecedented that was, after an understandably acrimonious period of negotiations which had fallen apart at certain points—at one point in the middle of 2017 resulting in Tun Mahathir walking away from PH, only returning after Nurul Izzah herself went to meet him and walked him back in.
Political outsiders, that is, people like you and me who comment on social media and complain about PH ineptitude, would sometimes ask: what is so difficult about this?
Some would naively ask, why do you need to worry about the race/religion of the candidate? This is being oblivious about the ideals-vs-reality dilemma (which I wrote about at length in an earlier article). While the lack of racialism in politics and the repudiation of UMNO’s long lie that DAP is a big, bad Chinese party are goals we want to achieve, it’s folly to go into political battle without recognising the mentalities of that constituency’s electorate, and strategise things like “who do you put in that seat” in accordance to those realities.
Which means, there are some seats where you simply can’t put DAP candidates right now. Even if the candidate is not Chinese.
Then there is the problem of political calculations and ambitions of the various Opposition parties.
As an example, if you look at the federal and state seats in Perak, you might notice an interesting fact: DAP won every single seat (federal and state) it contested in GE14. In contrast, PKR lost 10 of the 14 state seats they contested; PPBM was even worse, winning just 1 of 15 state seats. Now, this does not mean DAP is super-popular all across Perak and should contest every seat next time. But it makes a great case for DAP to expand beyond the 7 federal seats and 18 state seats it currently has; for example, it can try and work the ground for seats adjacent to existing seats. Yet internally, DAP may be blocked from contesting more seats because PKR insists on competing in Malay-majority seats. Perhaps among PKR’s motivations is to try and give itself the chance to make up the difference between them (4 seats) and DAP (18 seats). They might even, in GE 15, claim all the seats PPBM competed, rather than give DAP a few more seats to compete than before — even at the risk of losing most of them again and condemning PH Perak to yet another term of being state Opposition.
Or, maybe they will split the PPBM seats evenly among the three extant PH parties — 5 seats each, depending on who’s more confident to win where. Whichever is the case, they have to argue it out and decide soon.
Because here’s the thing: parties can’t work the ground (engage with locals, spend money to assist the poor or improve infrastructure, etc) in a seat they’re not representing, unless they know they will contest that seat in GE15. This is because resources are limited.
UMNO is so historic and entrenched that they can fall back purely on their name: an UMNO politician can set up a programme and the locals might easily fall in and help them with it.
Opposition parties get no such advantage. Opposition representatives and their staff are busy enough having to take care of the problems in their own constituencies, and trying to squeeze money everywhere they can find to help the needy. Syed Saddiq’s publicity stunts to get millions of ringgit of nationwide donations to help the people of Muar may seem amusing, but it’s actually a big red flag that highlights how badly federal Opposition MPs have been handicapped by the PN government’s cruelty to give little to no allocation to non-PN MPs. So when people on Twitter say Opposition should go down to the ground, it does not seem that Twitter people think about: well, where is the extra manpower to provide time and muscle power to do so? And then there’s money. Opposition don’t raid taxpayers coffers to fund their own political expenditures, whereas BN has no qualms doing so. That means, by being more ethical, as so many Twitterians expect Opposition to be, Opposition is weakened by not having the cash to employ more people to “go down to the ground” and to fund the initiatives that create goodwill for the Opposition. (And then it becomes easy for some, even PH supporters, to say “DAP/PKR/Amanah are lazy and don’t go down to meet rural people”.)
Point of all this is to say: Opposition parties have to ration their resources and select where they focus their efforts in expanding their “working the ground” mission.
And they can’t do this until PH parties have worked out amongst themselves where they will allocate their candidates for GE15, whenever it is.
Because they need to name their candidates, and those candidates need to start their groundwork now.
When you think about “engaging the locals” with the ultimate goal being that they will vote for you, you’re basically talking about a Christian evangelical mission (which, contrary to paranoid Malay Muslim minds, is not prevalent in this country). Think about it, what would it take to convert you to trust your vote to a BN politician? It would be an equally difficult mission, if not more difficult, to convert someone to vote for PH.
You can’t just walk into a new town and just start asking questions like, “why do you folks keep voting for UMNO?” You can’t even talk about politics. And for that matter, you can’t just walk up to a warung and just ask any question at all, just to appear personable. The moment you ask, they sense that you’re trying to preach about your party, and they tune off. Again, put yourself in their shoes, think about what would people have to do to get your attention without scaring you off. You have to do all the foreplay stuff first—or if you prefer a less vulgar metaphor: the “small talk” phase of political engagement—like feeding the poor, or getting to know the needs and mentalities of the locals, without ever bringing up politics. And then months later when you do bring it up, how do you do it without appearing grossly opportunistic? (“Oh, you help us just so that we will vote for you, issit?”) It’s all very delicate and awkward and Sisyphean.
It works better if this person who begins to engage with a new community, who might or might not end up as your party’s candidate, is a local himself, not a parachute candidate. But finding candidates who are local and also wisened and tactful in this grassroots level political seduction also takes time, unless they’re already volunteering or employed at an existing Opposition representative’s office.
Some other idealistic Twitterian might complain: why should we encourage politicians to be politicking now, when the pandemic is not over? First of all, these people use the word ‘politicking’ in an automatically pejorative manner, discounting the possibility that political strategising can be done responsibly. Secondly, any such political strategising should of course be done on top of the current work all PH representatives have been doing in taking care of the needy in their constituencies, and opposing the government’s continued inability to set proper policies that reduce the various harms of the Covid-19 pandemic, or the authorities’ iron fist approach to cooperative activists.
But, if people scream at PH for working these things out now, when the general election is still further away, then that’s like tying one of Lee Zii Jia’s hands to his back and insisting he must still defeat Chen Long. Why would you do that?
It is also important to have this conversation starting now, because PH doesn’t just need to work out its own internal strategy. They need to contend with MUDA, Pejuang, and Warisan. (Noting that Dr Maszlee, UPKO and PSB are there too.) It would be unwise to leave these allies out of PH’s considerations.
Many Twitterians like to amuse themselves making fun of MUDA and its supporters (who are not exclusively young people; Pete Buttigieg, the first millennial to be a US presidential candidate and was consistently top 5 in the opinion polls for Democrat candidates, found to his surprise that he was immensely popular among the middle-aged and elderly, who are highly excited with the prospect of young politicians taking over from their generation). Some PH supporters are suspicious of MUDA’s insistently neutral stance. The cries of suspicion about Syed Saddiq’s political stance due to his personal loyalty to his mentors, Tun Mahathir and Muhyiddin, both of whom after all kickstarted his political career, is a stupidly simplistic critique of him. The fact is, MUDA’s political demands are way closer to PH than it is to BN or PN, and in practice, Syed Saddiq has always stuck close to PH when it counted, including in the latest episode when he worked with PH leaders to keep the 105 Opposition MPs intact in submitting statutory declarations to the Agong. To my mind, it makes sense that MUDA is cooperating with PH when it comes to the GE15 battle later.
However, if seat allocations are difficult enough internally within PH, it gets harder to have to accommodate a young party like MUDA. As the upstart, MUDA may recognise that they will not be able to make too many demands to give them seats to compete. But shutting MUDA out entirely is suicide. If MUDA then decides to compete on their own at a few seats, and if they remain popular enough among some sectors of the electorate that they can peel away a few thousand, or even just a few hundred votes, that is enough to destroy the chances of PH winning (or even retaining) some of their seats. So the PH-MUDA conversation will be fraught with dilemmas and uncertainties. But if they can start now, come to a settlement early enough, then that will up the chances of success of MUDA, and therefore PH.
Speaking of MUDA, one thing they are doing right is that I actually have some idea of who else apart from Syed Saddiq will be fielded as candidates. On social media, MUDA leaders such as Dr Thanussha, Dr Mathen, Shahrizal Denci, and Amir Abd Hadi (though his upcoming Chevening scholarship could get in the way of an election campaign) have been very active on social media and in their activism fighting for a range of issues, not exclusively about youths. Who knows whether or where they’ll be fielded, but at least for people like me who frequent social media, when they do, we’d know who they are already, and that’s a good start. PH should make an effort to get their potential candidates to start making their presence known—they will fail plenty, as MUDA leaders did right at the beginning, but it’s better to fail early, than to start failing after Nomination Day.
Pejuang is a bit more difficult for PH to posit. Personally, I don’t see Pejuang being a relevant force, or having much of a long-term future in politics. Tun Mahathir’s most recent declaration that Pejuang will compete in 120 seats is met with skepticism. Will Tun Mahathir even contest the next election? Yet clearly PM7 still commands respect from hundreds of thousands of voters—likely many of whom are not in Twitter, so they’re not there to disturb your comfortable assumption that everybody thinks Tun Mahathir is a treacherous snake. Let’s be very clear, PH cannot afford to lose these voters. And yet, it makes no sense to give up too many seats to Pejuang to compete in GE15.
I will not pretend to know enough about Sabahan and Sarawakian politics to be able to comment extensively on Warisan and other Borneo parties and how PH can negotiate with them. GPS to me acts in bad faith; personally I don’t begrudge the fact that they focus on benefits and policies that exclusively benefit Sarawakians, what I find despicable is that they have never (even when the opportunity presents itself) cooperated with PH. And their ministers under PN were ignominiously lazy. Therefore they are the enemy, just like PAS. Either find ways to rip some seats from them, or write off the seats they own as impossible for PH, and move on.
I am told that in Sarawak, parties matter less than candidates when it comes to who the locals will vote for. Will DAP in Sarawak or PKR in Sabah be able to find local candidates in places they have yet to win? And is 20 months enough to make sufficient impact to oust the government incumbent (who probably has loads of cash to throw around, or can win elections simply by being the sons of former iconic leaders of Sarawak)? I was told that DAP did setup an initiative to provide basic infrastructure, education, and entrepreneurship assistance to the people in the interior region of Sabah and Sarawak; the idea was to help the locals first and get to know them without getting political, and only introducing DAP’s political machinery much later once trust is established. The programme was not very successful, unfortunately.
Warisan’s MPs are very friendly colleagues of PH MPs. But given Shafie Apdal’s ambitions—which to my mind is too much of a stretch to take seriously—how will PH and Warisan come to an arrangement about GE15?
Saying all this, I feel I’ve only just scratched the surface of the complexities surrounding seat allocations for PH and its allies.
Most people on Twitter—in fact, most Malaysians who aren’t in politics—would find this discussion surprisingly sprawling and rather headache-inducing. They will say: look, we don’t care how you guys work it out, just work it out amongst yourselves, okay? We just want a better government than BN in charge of the country, so you guys just win it for us, yeah?
And they’re quite right. This is the job of our Opposition parties to work this out. But the point of laying this all out is to remind the reader that, guys, this thing is far from straightforward. As a DAP ADUN said to me: “the win/lose dynamics is multidimensional”. When you ask your Opposition MPs or ADUNs to “buck up”, “get your act together”, “go down to the ground” … you should perhaps stop and think what it is that you think you are asking for, and then consider further whether you know enough what’s going on behind the scenes, and what they’ve done so far, and whether it is possible to ask them to do more, and if it is, whether they need YOUR help—you, sitting right there reading this—to help them in the mission of going down to the ground, and that if you’re not helping beyond complaining about PH on Twitter or Facebook, this would be the reason why PH will fail to win a majority in GE15.
For to set the nation back in the path towards progress and progressive values (setting aside all the imperfections and disappointments that may still incur your ire under a Pakatan 2.0 government), that is the medium term goal. Bluntly: PH and its allies must win GE15.
My urge to PH is: start now. You will fight and disagree to the point of breaking up. Get it done now, while the government is tied down with the difficult and complicated task of rescuing the country from the multiple public health and economic crises, a task it is less capable than PH in handling.
Take this breathing room to wrestle and inflict pain against each other. Then find your way to come back from the brink, and come to a settlement.
Then present a united front.
That’s the fundamental narrative you need to achieve in order to have a shot at defeating UMNO-PAS-PPBM-GPS.
