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Bread. 10 March 2008 Any lessons from the Malaysian general election for us?
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I don't know if this was generally how Singaporeans spent Sunday, 9 March 2008, or whether it was peculiar to the company I keep, but many around me seemed caught up in the events unfolding in Singapore's neighbour. After the elections, the Barisan Nasional (National Front, BN) saw its share of Parliamentary seats fall from 91% of the 222-seat lower house to 63%. I am still trying to find its percentage share of votes in the 2004 and 2008 elections, but so far unsuccessfully. If any reader has the data, please let me know. [Addendum 1 has the figures now] The severity of its relative defeat exceeded everybody's expectations. Even the three main opposition parties -- the Democratic Action Party (DAP), Parti Keadilian Rakyat (People's Justice Party, PKR) and Parti Islam Se-Malaysia (Malaysian Islamic Party, PAS) -- were taken aback by their own success. No doubt, many politicised Singaporeans shared in the joy of seeing a Goliath slayed by many Davids, but is there any relevance to our own domestic politics? Sure, we have a Goliath too, whom many would love to slay, but does the Malaysian experience provide any pointers for Singapore? * * * * * First, for the record, let me paint in broad strokes the results of Malaysia's general election, which was held on 8 March 2008. At the federal level, as mentioned above, BN's share of federal parliamentary seats fell to 140, or 63%. The BN is composed of a large number of parties, the chief ones among them being race-based parties. UMNO, which is Malay-based, dominates the front. In this election, however, while UMNO itself suffered losses, it was its junior partners that bore the brunt of the electorate's anger. Indian-based MIC and PPP were almost wiped out, as was Gerakan, nominally a multi-racial party, but effectively a Chinese-identified one. The main Chinese-based party, MCA, also suffered badly. Four cabinet ministers failed to retain their seats. The bigger shock for the BN was the loss of 4 state governments to the opposition, in addition to failing to win back Kelantan, a deeply conservative, virtually all-Malay, state. This state, prior to the 2008 election, was the only one among 13 states that wasn't ruled by the BN. In the 2004 general election, PAS won 24 seats and BN 21 in Kelantan's State Assembly. Later, PAS lost one seat to the BN in a by-election, and so, for some years, PAS's state government held on to power by only a one-seat margin, 23:22. The BN thought they had a good chance of seizing Kelantan in this election. In the event, they were crushed. The 2008 results showed PAS winning 38 State Assembly seats, PKR 1 seat, compared to just 6 for BN. Even more dramatic was the fall of Penang. From the 2004 election, DAP held just 1 seat out of 40 State Assembly seats. In 2008, DAP won all 19 seats that it contested. Together with 9 seats won by PKR, the two opposition parties are able to take over the state government from the BN. DAP's Lim Guan Eng will be Penang's new Chief Minister.
Likewise, various combinations of DAP, PKR and PAS outnumbered BN totals in the State Assemblies of Kedah, Perak and Selangor. PAS will provide the new Chief Ministers of the Kedah and Perak, while PKR's Secretary-general, Khalid Ibrahim, is expected to take over as the Chief Minister of Selangor. Even Kuala Lumpur, which is Malaysia's largest city but ruled directly as a Federal Territory, leaned heavily towards the opposition. It has no State Assembly, but has 11 parliamentary seats, of which the DAP won 5, while PKR won another 4. PAS and BN gained one each. * * * * * Widespread dissatisfaction among the Chinese and Indian minorities of Malaysia had been noted in the run-up to the polls. These communities had been upset for years by the way race-based affirmative action policies had been sidelining them in government contracts, university places and job opportunities. Lately, the government's and judiciary's pro-Islamic policies provided more flashpoints. Hindu temples had been razed, bibles banned from using the Arabic word "Allah" for God (when bibles in the Middle East use it routinely), and even the Supreme Court refused to order the bureaucracy to change Lina Joy's official documents from "Islam" to "Christianity", thus barring her from marrying the Christian man she loved. Various analysts' reports suggest that among Chinese Malaysians, support for the BN fell from around 65% typical of most previous elections, to about 35% in this one. Among Indian Malaysians, it may have fallen from 80% to about 45%. This would explain BN's loss of many constituencies where Indians and Chinese together outnumbered the Malays, tipping the state governments in Penang, Perak and Selangor over to the opposition. It is debatable if there are parallels in Singapore's politics with the racial and religious anger so prominent in this Malaysian election. This is not to say that among Singapore's racial minorities, there aren't persistent grumblings about marginalisation, both unintentional and overt, with an example of the latter being Malay underrepresentation in the military. But are these grievances as acute as in Malaysia? I'm not sure if I can answer this question, perhaps Malay and Indian readers can do a better job of assaying the ground than I can. What is different is that in Singapore, there is no political organisation that can articulate these grievances. Our draconian laws on political organising and speech make sure of that. Whether this is healthy or not is naturally another question, but the undeniable result is that in the short and medium term, race politics will not factor significantly in Singapore's political trends, since the minorities have no champion to look up to, certainly not to the same extent as happened in Malaysia. With this, most Singaporeans are going to come to the conclusion that while the Malaysian election was fun to watch, perhaps it doesn't hold too many lessons for us. But this would be seeing our neighbour's politics through our own race-filtered lenses, with the majority Chinese Singaporeans identifying with the concerns of Chinese Malaysians.
I would instead argue that far more pertinent to us was what happened to UMNO's Malay support. Analysts estimate that it fell 5 – 10%. Not much, you might say, but it was enough to give PAS a two-thirds majority in the Kelantan State Assembly, and big inroads in Kedah and other states. It also gave former Deputy Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim's PKR a huge boost. The PKR had held only one seat in the federal Parliament as a result of the previous 2004 election. In 2008, it leapfrogged both DAP and PAS to become the largest opposition party at the federal level, with 31 parliamentary seats. Why did the Malay ground shift away from UMNO? Didn't the community feel that they ought to stand solidly behind the party that championed their interests in the face of minority races' attacks on UMNO and the BN? Because the fall in Malay support was so unexpected, it may be a while before the reasons for it are fully discerned. Early indications however, are that inflation and the cost of living were key factors, issues that must also have impacted Chinese and Indian voters' decisions. This was linked to unhappiness with a widening income gap, in turn linked to a growing disgust with the elitism and cronyism of the BN. Possibly, corruption and Prime Minister Badawi's failure to do anything serious about it also figured in voters' minds. Even BN's pre-election promises of grand development plans for the more depressed regions of Malaysia didn't seem to make any difference. Perhaps people only saw in these plans more opportunities for the rich to get richer. Anwar Ibrahim's campaign proposal to scrap the race-based affirmation action policy that had been central to BN's governing paradigm since 1969, and that had favoured Malays all these decades, seemed to help his party with the Malay voter rather than hurt him. This counter-intuitive result needs in-depth analysis. On the face of it, it does seem to suggest that the average Malay voter is frustrated by the way the policy has been abused by the rich and powerful, and also that in the end, people are more concerned about their cost of living and class issues than defending race or religion. Herein, I suggest, is what is most pertinent about the Malaysian experience. The same trends of rising cost of living and a widening income gap are evident in Singapore. The same grievances about arrogance and the attempts by the rich and powerful to legitimise their gains through parliamentary dominance echo in Singapore too. So, watch it. © Yawning Bread
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Footnotes None Addenda
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Starting Saturday evening and through all of Sunday, I kept receiving one
sms after another keeping me updated on the "revolution up
north", as one message described it. This referred to the drubbing
the incumbent Malaysian government was receiving at the polls. Altogether,
3 different friends kept me posted on the results, and not a few more said
they were caught up in the "euphoria of the moment".
