The Danger of Unabated Exuberance

A Kadir Jasin

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THE glitch in the appointment of the Menteri Besar for the Democratic Action Party-led Perak state government is but one of the many challenges the opposition coalition has to face in the coming months.

These are lessons in coalition building. For the DAP, the problem arose out of the fact that it does not have a Malay state assemblyman in its line-up.

There are two main reasons for this. First, the DAP is not a popular choice of political affiliation for the Malays. Thus Malay state assemblymen and members of Parliament are few and far between in the party. It has been years that the DAP has not had a Malay elected representative.

Second, the DAP, like its coalition partners – the Malaysian Islamic Party (Pas) and the Parti Keadilan Rakyat (People’s Justice Party) -- has not expected to do well in state assembly elections.

The DAP can choose to accept reality by appointing a Malay state assemblyman from its partner parties as the coalition’s Menteri Besar or remain an opposition in the state assembly and fight for the amendment of the state constitution.

The longer the issue is allowed to continue, the greater is the risk of the coalition weakening and possibly falling apart. Either way it would give the Barisan Nasional an opportunity to start to regain its position.

Neither the DAP nor its partners can dismiss the possibility of the BN making overtures to their representatives to defect. It is understood that such an attempt had already been made by the BN in Selangor by targeting Pas assemblymen but apparently to no avail.

The opposition coalition Menteri Besar for Kedah was the first to be sworn in. He is the veteran Pas member for Sungai Limau, Azizan Abdul Razak. In the rice bowl state, Pas bagged 16 out of 36 assembly seats, PKR five, DAP one and a solitary independent.

It was reported that the Pas-led state government might co-opt the independent, who is an Indian, into the state executive council as representative of Indians who form 6.2 per cent of Kedah’s voters. This is a good lesson in ethnic accommodation for the Chinese-dominated DAP.

In Penang, the DAP Secretary-General Lim Guan Eng had received the informal handing over of the state from the long-serving Gerakan Chief Minister, Koh Tsu Koon. The smiles and the firm handshake between the two Chinese leaders had not gone unnoticed.

In Selangor, the former Umno Stalwart and corporate figure, Khalid Ibrahim, is on the way to being sworn as the first non-Umno Menteri Besar of the state. The PKR won 15 assembly seats, DAP 13 and Pas eight out of 56 seats.

The choice of Menteris Besar and Chief Minister is the first small step towards firming up the opposition coalition. The more import decisions are in the areas of policies, projects and civil service.

Here, exuberance and vindictiveness can have a high price. Hasty removal of policies and programmes can cause the coalition to lose goodwill and trust of a section of the voters who rooted for it.

In choosing to please the minority, the coalition may be alienating the majority. The coalition could not have scored such a victory had it not been for the BN supporters voting for its candidates in a show of protest against the ruling party and its leadership. Even the abstention by the BN supporters was beneficial to the coalition.

If the opposition parties hopes to make their highly effective electoral pact more permanent and long term, they should learn a lesson or two from the BN and the Kelantan Pas governments in matters of race, religion and wealth distribution.

Failing which the Malay voters who threw their lot with the oppositions (out of hatred for some personalities in Umno) in the March 8 poll may revert to the BN four or five years from now.

To begin with, Umno is not unaware that its losses were due largely to the Malays’ hatred of the so-called Prime Minister’s kitchen cabinet allegedly made up, among others, of his powerful son-in-law (MP) Khairy Jamaluddin, his businessman son Kamaluddin, his wife Jeanne Danker Abdullah, his friends like former Deputy Prime Minister, Musa Hitam, NSTP Deputy Chairman Kalimullah Hassan, Bernama Chairman and PM’s NCER adviser, Annuar Zaini and Equine Capital Executive Chairman Patrick Lim Soo Kit.

Rightly or wrongly, these people are seen as having greater influence on Abdullah than the party and the civil service.

Another major decision of the opposition coalition is the selection of the Opposition Leader for the Parliament. The convention is for the post to be given to a senior member of the party that has the most number of seats in the Dewan Rakyat, the lower house of the Parliament. In the March 8 poll, PKR won 31, DAP 28 and Pas 23.

On Feb. 24 nomination day, the Singapore Business Times writer, S Jayasankaran, asked my opinion about the likely outcome of the election.

In the Feb. 25 issue of the newspaper, I was quoted as saying: “If the opposition plays its card right, the BN could lose its two-thirds majority in the Parliament.”

Jayasankaran immediately qualified the statement saying, “not many people would agree.”

Now that the oppositions did indeed deprive the BN of its two-thirds majority, I am going to risk making another my prediction --- if the opposition parties plays their card right in the Parliament, the state assemblies and in their own council meetings, they stand a good chance of becoming a true multi-party alternative to the BN.

Of course unabated exuberance, vindictiveness and the intoxication of power can bring them down as quickly and as decisively as they were put on their high perch on March 8. The law of motion dictates that the pendulum swings in both directions.

[UPDATE, 14 March]

IT’S heartening to see that Umno is beginning to learn the bitter lesson of being the opposition. After today’s Friday prayers, some 1,000 of its members staged an hour-long protest at Kontar, the head office of the Penang Government, chanting such slogans as 'Don’t sideline the Malays' and 'Don’t abolish the NEP.'

The protest, according to a Malaysiakini report, was led by Penang Umno Secretary Azhar Ibrahim. They were against the new Penang Chief Minister Lim Guan Eng's declaration that the state would do away with the New Economic Policy (NEP) provisions.

Among those spoke at the rally included former deputy chief minister Abdul Rashid Abdullah, Sungai Dua state assemblyman Jasmin Mohamed and Umno Bukit Mertajam chief Musa Sheikh Fadzir.

There were about 3,000 onlookers and most of the shops nearby, including Maybank, were briefly closed.

It was also a lesson to the Federal Reserve Unit (FRU) troopers who were used to controlling the opposition protesters. Today, eight truckloads of them, armed with water cannons, were deployed to control Umno protesters.

In another development, the Raja of Perlis had appointed the BN Bintong Assemblyman, Mat Isa Sabu, as the Menteri Besar replacing Shahidan Kassim, ending weeks of uncertainty concerning the latter’s position as state leader.