The Crux of Malaysian Politics
I see so many complaints on Facebook and Twitter that “Perikatan Nasional is not the government we voted for”. I’m sorry, but that’s wrong. Malaysian voters enabled PN to exist. It is our own fault that we are suffering under this Muhyiddin-led incompetent government.
Maybe you feel offended to be thusly accused — “but I did not vote for this government!”. What’s missing here is a general understanding of how our elections actually impact our politics. Allow me to explain.
Imagine that politics is a boardgame. To understand how to play, you need to know the layout of the gameboard, and the rules that the players operate under.
THE GAMEBOARD
Parlimen — or to be specific, the Dewan Rakyat — has 222 seats, and each seat represents a constituency of voters. An MP (wakil rakyat) is elected for each seat. A Malaysian government is formed by the collection of MPs from the coalition of parties with the largest number of seats: 112 is the finish line that needs to be crossed to gain a simple majority (the formula being: 50% +1). Among this group of MPs, they will have decided who among them can garner the most confidence to lead them in government — this person, we call the Prime Minister. The PM then gets to appoint a Cabinet of Ministers, who execute the policies of this government.
THE PLAYERS
Why do we have political parties? Because parties have ideologies, and their ideology decides their agenda. For example, in very simplistic terms, UMNO wants to ensure Malays rule Malaysia; DAP believes in equitable multiracialism and social democracy; PAS wants to hold Muslim minds hostage while gaslighting non-Muslims so that they can hoard money and luxuries for themselves; and so on.
Parties fight to become the government so that they can execute their agenda. A government can only rule for up to five years (= one term), after which an election must be held, sort of like a reset button. This term limit is the most important thing about our type of democracy: that expiry date forces a government to think about what it needs to do in the five years they have to win the next election, which means, under ideal circumstances, that their objective is to try to make the rakyat’s lives better than the last round.
Notice here, that there is a high level of subjectivity as to what “making the rakyat’s lives better” means. Every party has a different theory (their party ideology) about what that means and how to achieve it (their party agenda). An election, then, is for the rakyat to choose which party’s ideology they agree with, and thus which agenda they want. In a democracy, the loudest voice (the party with the most votes) gets the say (becomes the government).
With me so far? Good.
THE RULES
Notice the operative phrase I used earlier: “coalition of parties”. You see, there are two types of political systems.
In countries like the USA and the UK, there are only two major parties: Republicans vs. Democrats, Conservatives vs. Labour. As such, one party dominates the election (usually), and that party then forms the government — as of 2021, the Democrats govern the USA, and the Conservatives rule the UK. Straightforward.
In contrast, in continental European countries like Germany, Belgium, and the Netherlands, a dozen or more parties compete in elections, none of which can expect to win a simple majority by itself — typically a couple will win 20% of seats, a few others 10%, and many more barely registering 1–2%. For example, the current German government is formed by the CDU and CSU parties in coalition with the SPD.
Consequently, after the election is over, parties have to sit down with each other to negotiate, and the combination of parties that can gang together, in a stable manner, with enough seats to cross the simple majority (50% +1) — this coalition of parties will succeed in forming the government. Taking the Germans as an example again: it took more than 4 months of negotiations after the elections for the parties to agree to form a government!
This kind of multi-party politics will seem rather messy to us Malaysians, because parties often don’t agree with each other, and sometimes they even vehemently oppose each other. (Imagine a Green party having to join hands with a neoliberal capitalist right-wing party.) So in these cases, parties have to negotiate to compromise or even give up on some of its agenda in order to be part of government. No party gets to have everything they want. But they know that the alternative is being in the minority or in Opposition — it means having no influence or control at all in deciding the direction of the country. If your aim in entering politics is to make people’s lives better, it is almost a complete waste of time to be in Opposition.
I bring this up, because Malaysia’s system is kind of a weird hybrid of these two: our system is technically like the continental Europe multi-party system, but for six decades it behaved like the US/UK style 2-party system.
You see, since the Tunku Abdul Rahman days, Perikatan, and later Barisan Nasional, was formed by the core group of UMNO-MCA-MIC (orbited by a group of satellite parties like the Borneo parties and Gerakan), and in every election since 1955 they’ve competed as if they’re one single party. This is why our parents used to be told to pangkah dacing; voters wouldn’t be told to vote for the MCA star or the UMNO keris on the ballot paper.
But it is important to note that BN is in essence a coalition, and there’s nothing in the rules preventing MCA or MIC from splitting off. We were just conditioned for decades to think of BN as if it’s one party that will never break up.
This helps BN, because it simplifies things for the voters. Voters’ choice boils down to: do you like BN? Or do you want to pick one of the many Opposition parties (who, because they were using their own party flags, gives the impression of being disunited)? And to be fair to BN, for most of the time they were in power, voters were happy with the progress they see, so there was simply no reason to ubah.
Another good reason why it’s beneficial to compete in elections as if BN is one party, is that it is tactically unwise for all parties to compete in every seat. For this reason, BN will negotiate within itself to assign seats to the party most likely to win — that area got more Chinese, put MCA there, etc.
There is a game theory element to this. Once BN is competing as a solid coalition, it makes no sense for the Opposition to compete as separate parties, because if DAP and PAS and PKR all compete for the same seat against BN, they will split the vote and it will be impossible for BN to lose (and pointless for DAP and PAS and PKR to even compete at all). Hence, since the Barisan Alternatif and Pakatan Rakyat days, the Opposition had gotten together and competed in elections as a bloc.
And that is how in the last 20 years Malaysian voters have been voting as if they have two parties to vote for — Barisan or Pakatan.
It took 2020’s Sheraton Move to finally break apart that illusion: there were never just two parties to vote for, but two columns of parties, with some parties shifting from one column to the other, and sometimes shifting back.
This left a lot of Malaysians discombobulated about politics: “vote for what, if parties can just hop around like that?” Also, look at Bersatu and PKR, which for a while had MPs sprinkled across both PN and PH for a few months, until eventually the Mahathir faction left to found Pejuang, and the Azmin faction sought shelter under Bersatu. Many Malaysians’ heads were spinning from the bewildering political alignments that were happening in real time, which they had never even imagined was possible. “That must be against the rules!” was an exclamation we heard a lot from Malaysians this past year.
But that’s because most Malaysians have long assumed that our politics behaves in the US/UK-style 2-party system. But if you change your thinking, and start seeing our politics in the model of the continental European style multi-party system, suddenly it becomes easier for your mind to digest and grasp these political plays.
First of all, all these parties — UMNO, DAP, PKR, PAS, Amanah, Bersatu, PSM, MCA, MIC, Gerakan, and the whole array of Borneo parties (so many of them!) — are technically independent from each other. This means if they are in alliance now, there is always a chance they’ll split up later; or if they seem like enemies now, there is always a chance they could ally later, if party objectives shift (or the party leader is replaced).
Secondly, being forced to band together with other parties in a coalition means your agenda is always going to be compromised. Within Pakatan, DAP will never get everything it wants, PKR will never get everything it wants, Amanah will never get everything it wants. This gets complicated for the voters, who would rather just not be concerned about party ideologies at this point. They just want a functioning government.
But the problem is, voters have the wrong idea about what a functioning government looks like. When PH was in power, voters expected PH to behave as if it’s one united entity — and when the Ministers from different parties sometimes publicly air their disagreements with one another, this looks like a bad government to Malaysians.
It isn’t. That’s how a functioning coalition government looks like. We mustn’t forget that Malaysians do not have identical interests, given the multiracial, multicultural, multilingual, multi-everything feature of our nation. DAP-PKR-Bersatu-Amanah each represented their supporters’ interest, which sometimes clash with each other. After airing their disagreements, and then hearing the public’s response (nowadays often through social media), the parties will then come to a negotiated compromise about how to proceed.
Malaysians, if there’s one single point that I want you to take away from this article, it’s this: publicly-aired disagreements within the same coalition about matters of substance (not about positions or power or scandals and slander) is normal, and good.
The dysfunction of PH wasn’t that the parties were publicly arguing with each other. The dysfunction was that PH was betrayed by bad PH MPs who decided to defect and fatally weaken the coalition from within.
Sheraton Move is a bit like that cue ball in a snooker game that strikes the other balls, causing them to careen all across the table.
After the balls have settled on the snooker table, the parties then scrambled to lock in enough MPs to hit the 50% +1 threshold — the rule of the game, remember? It is the same 222 MPs that we all voted for who are in play.
However, in this game, when the situation got murky, the King can come in to be the decider (a bit like the Supreme Court during the Gore v. Bush fight over the contentious 2000 election results). Long story short, that was how Perikatan Nasional was haphazardly cobbled into existence.
Much has been made about how unstable PN has been, with lots of, yes, public airing of disagreements. Unlike PH, PN MPs were backbiting each other over positions and power and scandals and slander. Also unlike PH, PN never had anything solid to bond them together. Where PH, despite their differences, were united about fighting kleptocracy and making policies to help the rakyat, PN getting stuck together was purely about holding on to power. See how UMNO kept trying to wriggle out under a Bersatu PM and Bersatu Chief Ministers, and how PAS was wringing their hands begging for PN to stay together so that they can buy more Mercedes and shout aggravating insults at the people they govern? That whole shtick about “Malaysia should be ruled by Malay Muslims only” is complete nonsense that even PAS-UMNO-Bersatu themselves don’t believe in; they just hope that enough Malay Muslims believe it.
Where does all that leave you, the voter? Perhaps you felt betrayed with the vote you gave to Muhyiddin or Rina Harun, if politicians like that are gonna switch coalitions; or to Azmin or Zuraida, if they’re gonna switch parties. Perhaps you feel powerless.
You’re not. You just have to understand what exactly your limited power buys you.
By now, I hope you understand that you, the Malaysian voter, do not get to choose your government. You do not even get to choose the Prime Minister. The feeling you have in a general election that you are voting for either a government or a Prime Minister is an illusion. It doesn’t feel like an illusion because, for the most part in the last 60 odd years, if you choose your MP and s/he wins and their party wins, then you get to have the government and the Prime Minister you expected.
But in actual fact, all this while, all you were doing is to choose a person: the MP. The MP may hop to another party later; we can curse him to death for it, but it’s legal (until a future parliament decides to create a new rule forbidding it—something you can lobby your MP to enact, perhaps get a celebrity MP like Syed Saddiq to champion). The position of Prime Minister may be given to another MP, for any number of reasons, with the consent of the Agong. All of these are out of your control.
The only thing under your control, is who represents you in your constituency.
Pick the candidate, not the party.
That’s the paradigm shift Malaysians need to have.
If all Malaysian voters can learn to do this, then the end result is that we will have a Parlimen filled with better quality MPs, so that even for MPs who are from parties you oppose or hate, you can at least respect that they are serious-minded about the work. For example, for someone of my politics (a Pakatan Harapan supporter), I won’t mind seeing Khairy Jamaluddin or Shahril Hamdan from UMNO get elected to their seats, and if I were voting in their constituencies, I would vote for UMNO. This is even though I’ve hated UMNO for giving us Najib and Zahid and Adham and Annuar and Ku Nan. But this is what I mean by picking the candidate, not the party.
Because if the Parlimen contains better quality MPs, then we are more likely to derive from them a better quality government. If you remove such terrible, horrible MPs like Zahidi Zainul Abidin (UMNO) and Mohameddin Ketapi (Warisan) and Tiong King Sing (PDP) from Parlimen, then they don’t get the chance to be a Minister and torture the rakyat with stupid policies and nonsensical statements. [This is not 100% true, they can come in as Senators then be appointed Ministers, as Radzi Jidin and Wan Fayhsal did. But if they’re not even elected as MPs, then their parties are less likely to have the seats to even form the government to begin with.]
You each have your own political preferences: you may be more conservative or liberal, you may value religiosity or secularism more, you may be motivated by self-interest in seeing whether an MP candidate is speaking about things that can help you better take care of your family — all good ways to help you discern which candidate’s values speak to you more.
Pick based on that. Not just because that candidate is from this or that party.
Then I believe the country can move forward.
