Permatang Pauh and beyond

Permatang Pauh and beyond Khoo Boo Teik 20 August 2008 - Aliran Barring massive electoral fraud, Anwar is one by-election and two weeks short of returning to Parliament. When he does, he’d be the Opposition Leader of a second coalition, says Khoo Boo Teik. After that people would want to know if he’d really form a new Federal government in mid-September as he has declared, promised, or threatened. ... Permatang Pauh which has 58,459 voters presently has been an interesting electoral battle ground. Here in 1982, upon joining UMNO, Anwar won against the Parti Islam incumbent, demonstrating the huge electoral support Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad received when he led BN for the first time. (Thereafter, Anwar retained his seat against the challenges of other PAS notables, Mohamad Sabu and Mahfuz Omar.) Seventeen years later, joining the Malay revolt against Mahathir and UMNO, Permatang Pauh responded to Anwar’s humiliation by electing his wife, Wan Azizah, in her contest against an erstwhile Anwar lieutenant, Dato’ Dr Ibrahim Saad. Only Permatang Pauh was narrowly left standing in 2004 when BN’s unprecedented sweep cost Parti Keadilan Rakyat four of its five parliamentary seats. Last March, however, any UMNO hope of seizing Permatang Pauh and wiping out Keadilan was dashed when Wan Azizah won her largest ever majority (while 30 other Keadilan candidates were victorious elsewhere). Significant shifts What can we infer from Permatang Pauh’s electoral record and its several startling results? For the past 26 years, the constituency has been loyal to Anwar and Azizah. Crucially, though, its electorate has taken turns over several decades to support PAS, UMNO and Keadilan. In the heat of previous battles, the deeper significance of this willingness to vote in and vote out might have been overlooked. But such an attitude among the voters is precisely what’s necessary to liberalize the political system. The present state-level balance of power is unusually equitable. Within Permatang Pauh, the State Legislative Assembly seats of Penanti, Permatang Pasir and Seberang Jaya are respectively held by Keadilan, PAS and UMNO. In other words, no party has a monopoly over local support. This situation may not gladden the hearts of party partisans. But it needn’t dishearten those who seek to pluralize the political system. Moreover, the tripartite division of seats at state level suggests that this 69-percent-Malay constituency is barren soil for narrow appeals to ‘Malay unity’, UMNO’s constant refrain since Reformasi was first declared by Anwar in Permatang Pauh in September 1998. And if a constituency such as Permatang Pauh, with its 31 per cent non-Malay voters, is also poor soil for BN’s ethnic politics, as shown by the March 2008 election, then the gerrymandering that long favoured BN against the stand-alone race-based parties has been undermined. In short, this small-town constituency has quietly anticipated the shifts in voter attitudes and voting behaviour that now make a two-coalition system feasible. Rebelliousness The tenor of the by-election will surely be set by a persisting voter rebelliousness made up of four parts. First, the 8 March voter defiance of BN remains. Abdullah Badawi’s regime has offered nothing meaningful to assuage non-Malay anger at UMNO, or to reverse Malay disenchantment with Abdullah’s leadership. For their losses in March, BN’s non-Malay-based parties blamed UMNO while large segments of UMNO blamed Abdullah. Hence, the low or sharply reduced popularity and approval ratings for Abdullah, Najib, and BN in the Merdeka Centre polls of July and according to other less methodical soundings of public opinion. The ratings are indications that the regime has not won back disgruntled voters. Inflation Second, there’s the post-election anger at worsening inflation, most starkly represented by the 41 per cent and 100 per cent increases in petroleum and diesel prices respectively in June. By now, public resentment of inflation is part of a deeper loss of confidence in the Abdullah regime’s ability to manage what many fear is impending economic decline. Indeed, at the Bankers Club Luncheon and Forum of 15 July, Tengku Razaleigh Hamzah dismissed Abdullah’s various ‘Corridors’ as ‘stillborn projects’. Tengku Razaleigh described current economic policy as being ‘haphazard, driven by whims and special interest projects rather than by a cohesive design geared to shape areas of distinct national competitive advantage’. Many voters would remember that Pakatan Rakyat’s New Malaysian Agenda stresses an urgent need for reform precisely to restore national competitive advantage. The return of the sodomised Third, there’s the collective disgust at Sodomy II (see ‘Conquering and vulnerable’, Aliran Monthly, 28, 5, 2008). The charges, based on Saiful Bukhari Azlan’s police report of ‘consensual sodomy’ performed by Anwar on him, will be tested in a court of law in September. But with only 11 per cent of the Merdeka Centre’s surveyed respondents believing Anwar to be culpable, the court of public opinion has resoundingly rejected Sodomy II. An electorate, and especially the Malay electorate, that painfully remembers Anwar’s 1998 sodomy trial is bound to regard Sodomy II as a politically-directed character assassination to preempt Anwar’s return to Parliament. Political degeneration And fourth, there is impatience over Abdullah’s undelivered promises of institutional reform. Politics in the country appears to have been reduced to a charade of allegations and counter-allegations, police reports and counter-reports, and statutory declarations and counter-declarations. Where have these led? These have not clarified controversies such as the Shaariibuu Altantuya murder, Sodomy II, or the alleged roles of the Inspector-General of Police and the Attorney-General in alleged evidence-fixing during Sodomy I. These have not allayed suspicions over the disappearances of private investigator, P. Balasubramaniam (who had made two opposed statutory declarations in two days, first linking and then delinking Najib from the Altantuya murder trial) and Hospital Pusrawi’s Dr Mohamed Osman Abdul Hamid (whose medical report on Saiful had indicated no sign of sodomy). Such are the symptoms, to paraphrase Tengku Razaleigh, of ‘a crippling loss of confidence in our key institutions’ when ‘personality dominated politics degenerates’, leading to ‘the destruction of reputations, intrigues, spy scandals, succession plans and whatnot as stratagems to resolve leadership contests’. ...more