After 7 consecutive wins, Pakatan Rakyat was suddenly confronted with a lost in the recent Bagan Pinang by-election. It was not totally unexpected, after all, PAS-PR candidate lost the seat to UMNO in the last “political tsunami”-12th General Election even though the Opposition coalition managed to win the Teluk Kemang Parliamentary seat and three other seats out of 5 state seats within the parliamentary area.

From the beginning, PAS-PR was the underdog. Regardless of the 308 euphoria, they were battling on the opponent’s stronghold. Add to that, UMNO’s candidate, Isa Samad, former Menteri Besar of Negeri Sembilan for more than two decades and a former Federal Minister, was in many ways a local General. The fact that Isa was selected as UMNO’s candidate after an absence of 3 years, showed the enormous local support which asserted tremendous pressure on the Party to allow him to contest. He was forced into political wilderness the last 3 years after being convicted of money politics by the Party’s discipline machinery.

And to further add to that, the huge UMNO machinery the Country is so used to, the employment of huge amount of ringgits and the advantages of having Federal and State Government machineries reduced substantially PAS-PR’s chances of wrestling the seat from UMNO. Almost every day, we read of promises of election goodies from UMNO ranging from building new schools to scholarships to housings to entrepreneur programs and aids and small handouts to residents and voters.

I am not trying to justify for the dismal performance of PAS-PR; but we must put UMNO’s win into perspective. UMNO and BN component parties must be reminded that the Bagan Pinang win is but expected in the above sense and they should not be too quickly to translate the victory into a vote of approval for either UMNO’s “Ketuanan Melayu” (Malay Supremacy) or Prime Minister Najib’s 1Malaysia polemics. It is quite amusing to see UMNO’s traditional Indian-based partner party, MIC and the newly minted Makkal Sakti Party vying for recognition that one of them delivered the Indian votes and not the other. Again, it is still too early to say that the non Malay votes have returned to Barisan Nasional although there is obviously a new wind of change within the Indian community with the setting up of new Indian-based political parties such as MMSP and the Human Rights Party.

Granted the above, DAP veteran Lim Kit Siang had said that the defeat of PR should be an occasion for the coalition to go back to the drawing board. One of the major weaknesses of PR is the lack of a centralized and integrated operating mechanism. Each of the PR component parties operates their own campaigns which were coordinated with the main campaign by PAS. This is not to say that there is no cooperation between PR component parties. Far from it, there was an obvious and high spirit of cooperation especially among the grassroots and evident by the sharing of ceramah stage by PR leaders from different parties. Yet PR cooperation was thus far by default rather than by design.

What the coalition crucially need at this moment is an intentional planning of a centralized mechanism, which must include a political bureau to establish and project a united political stance, an information mechanism to disseminate a consistent message of the coalition to the voters and a disciplinary mechanism to enforce the coalition’s shared values among its members.

Lack of coordination and hiccups in cooperation are not strangers to political coalition especially at the early stage of formation. At its inception, the then newly-formed coalition, Parti Perikatan was not without any problems among its member parties. MIC itself was a late-comer to the coalition, contesting against UMNO with its original partners in the left-leaning PUTERA-AMCJA and even with the Independence of Malaya Party (IMP) led by Dato’ Oon Ja’afar, himself founder and later an UMNO dissident. In 1954, MIC ditched its original partner to join the UMNO-MCA coalition, 3 years after the coalition was formed.

Nevertheless, today, time is of the essence for Pakatan Rakyat. True, the learning curve is steep, but the Opposition coalition is desperate to meet the 2013 (or possibly earlier) deadline when the 13th General Election will be held. And to echo Lim Kit Siang again, Bagan Pinang should be the occasion that calls for a return to the drawing board. PR must emerge from this episode as a more united coalition and a stronger political alternative to UMNO-BN, especially in the areas of racial integration and being a clean and democratic government.

And as for UMNO-BN, the whole of Malaysia, especially the voters in Bagan Pinang, will be measuring their million-ringgit projects promises to see if they are indeed genuine or its business as usual on the UMNO-BN turf – empty political rhetoric and money politics and power play.

Steven Sim
The author was formerly Special Assistant to Penang State Exco for Youth and Sports and Women, Family & Community Development. He is currently taking time off to pursue his post-graduate degree.

Tags: Steven Sim Chee Keong 沈志強

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 15th, 2009 at 6:41 pm and is filed under English, Kenyataan Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.