Strengthening the nation’s sense of common purpose is all the unity government needs to do

By OOI KEE BENG. This article first appeared under the column “Picking on the Present” in Forum, The Edge Malaysia Weekly on February 26, 2024 – March 3, 2024

IT IS TRUE that no political party in Malaysia has ever commanded a large enough majority to govern without the help of a coalition. Barisan Nasional (BN) was no doubt dominant from 1974 to 2017, but it was in reality a super-coalition pretending to be a party. Umno called the shots most of the time within a registered party called BN, but instead of working towards national unity and admitting to its stranglehold on power, lawmaking and policymaking at the federal level, it preferred to conjure up bogeymen to justify its inability to create a united society. That way, its lack of national ambitions, its corrupt behaviours and its political failures could be blamed on others.

No doubt Malaysia has never been an easy type of country to rally and regiment. And given its ethnic and cultural diversity, it was always more tempting to fragment the unlikely federation than to unite its parts. Furthermore, the democratic model it was born with was not always helpful. The electoral structure tended more to encourage populism from a privileged elite and an unlearned population more than principled governance. Symptomatically, interventions over the years through malapportionment and gerrymandering and other means had successively degraded the principle of vote equality.

It took the Bersih movement to highlight the rot in the electoral system through its hugely successful street rallies, especially in 2007. This movement was almost the catalyst that revived the stalled Reformasi movement ignited by Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim’s arrest 10 years earlier, in September 1998.

Even those who orate that nothing ever really changes in Malaysian politics — and there are many such shoot-from-the-hip pundits — have to admit that the last 25 years have been eventful ones.

But what are the changes — however dramatic and unexpected they might have been — adding up to? Can we distinguish in 2024 an evolved path in Malaysian politics, however vague it may be, which is informed by the events in 1998?

The coalitional structure devolves

There are in fact quite a few signals that can be picked out from the turbulence of the last two decades. For starters, the fall of Umno and BN in 2018 was a much-awaited and broad rejection of Umno’s stubborn politics of disunity and of its worst consequences, such as endemic corruption, low public trust in government, poor leadership across the board and a desperately fragmented society. Most tellingly, the Malay vote was now quite unpredictable, signalling deep vicissitudes in the community as a whole.

But looking ahead, two major signals can be picked up quite clearly. First, the 2022 general election was a struggle between coalitions. This is nothing new. What is new — and this may help in predicting how Malaysian politics will develop in the near future — is that the new government that resulted from the election and subsequent negotiations is a coalition of coalitions, not of parties.

That configuration itself expresses more vividly the constitution of Malaysian society. Instead of a full-frontal focus on race, as had been the case since the 1950s, the coalitions we are now dealing with are territorial in nature. Sufficient unity now exists in Sarawak for it to be represented by a coalition of parties, the Gabungan Parti Sarawak, while Sabah is represented by two coalitions, the larger Gabungan Rakyat Sabah and the smaller Warisan. In the peninsula, Anwar’s Pakatan Harapan governs solidly in the most urban and industrialised states, while a humbled Umno, Pakatan’s erstwhile foe but present key ally, rules in the more rural areas outside of the northern states. The opposition coalition — consisting of the Islamist PAS and Umno splinter party Bersatu, as well as the tag-along Chinese-based party Gerakan — controls the state governments in the four northern Malay states.

Towards an extroverted Malaysia

In summary, the federal nature more than the racial nature of Malaysian society and politics is now on show, and we can expect policymaking in the coming years to acknowledge this situation more clearly, especially in economic development. Looking back, one can see how the centralising behaviour of the Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad years was distinctly a denial of this essence of Malaysian polity.

Logically, the decline of the politics of disunity should usher in a period of politics of unity. This is the second major signal to pay attention to. This one holds significance — first, with regard to evolution of the national narrative and second, where positive changes in the country’s political culture are concerned. In fact, the institutional reforms that most pundits call for from the unity government, and consider as criteria for real change, may not prove as decisive, impactful or influential in the long run, as those aforementioned areas of contention.

Any promotion of a politics of unity — beyond the government styling itself a unity government — has to target the difficult task of generating a sense of common purpose in Malaysian society and a lived reality of togetherness. Thinking strategically, whatever fragmentation in federal policies seen since 1970 sought after all to undermine exactly that, with race and religion being persistently brought into play for that exact purpose.

The fall of Umno from power was in a phrase that vain strategy of “holding power through disunity” finally hitting a wall.

Policymaking under the unity government will now have to be much more extroverted than ever before. Anwar and his group of coalitions will do well to look outside of Putrajaya, outside of the Klang Valley and outside of the country to resuscitate Malaysia’s economic prowess and the disenchanted arms of government, but also to evolve narratively and engage concretely with the world, outside of debilitating parochial and fragmentary concerns.

Datuk Dr Ooi Kee Beng is executive director of Penang Institute and manager of its Forum for Leadership and Governance (FLAG@PI) programme. He is also a Visiting Senior Fellow at the ISEAS – Yusof Ishak Institute. His latest book, Signals in the Noise (Singapore: Faction Press, 2023), is a compilation of writings from 2018 to 2023. Homepage: wikibeng.com.