Friday 29 Mar 2024
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This article first appeared in The Edge Financial Daily on December 12, 2018

KUALA LUMPUR: Pakatan Harapan may have secured the majority of Malaysian voters’ support in the 14th general election on May 9, but without a central narrative and a shift away from communal or race-based politics, the Pakatan government risks becoming unstable, political observers warned yesterday.

“I would argue that we have not seen a new Malaysia yet, but a Malaysia still in transition,” political analyst Dr Wong Chin Huat said at the New Malaysia Rising forum organised by the Jeffrey Cheah Institute.

He added that the Pakatan administration’s stability is affected by a lack of healthy political competition that is non-communal.

“I don’t think pretending that we have come to a solution helps [despite the smooth democratic change on May 9]. The anti-ICERD rally last weekend is a wake-up call,” Wong added, referring to the rally against the ratification of the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (ICERD), organised by Malay-Muslim groups, Umno and PAS.

DAP strategist and Deputy Defence Minister Liew Chin Tong noted in the last general election, voters supported Pakatan and PAS to remove the ruling regime.

“The common purpose of defeating [former prime minister] Datuk Seri Najib Razak held for a while, but now we need the next [central narrative],” Liew said.

He opined that Umno will no longer be relevant in future, and said a new party “better than PH” may emerge in the next general election to take on Pakatan.

He added that this cyclical transition would happen more quickly as the public have “no more fear of voting against the government”.

However, Wong cautioned that as Pakatan struggles to maintain its centrist position, Umno and PAS may join forces to push a more right-wing agenda. “Without great power comes a great lack of obligation and responsibility [to take the middle ground],” he said.

Wong, the head of institutional reforms and governance performance at the Penang Institute, also pointed to a possible threat by nationalist groups in Sabah and Sarawak.

To counter that, he said the government must look into empowering the bottom 40% (B40) income group among Malays and Borneo nationalists. Wong also stressed on the need to focus on non-communal matters such as climate change and the environment, and class and economic struggles.

Meanwhile, Liew suggested a shift towards prioritising employment for the B40. “We must recognise that there is anxiety, much of which has some basis in the economic conditions among the B40 Malays,” said Liew.

“The focus used to be on equity, education, entrepreneurship and then employment. We need to reverse that to prioritise employment [over equity].”

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