AUGUST 10 — There is a particular tragedy that belongs to reformist parties. They are born because something is wrong. They gather people who are angry, excluded or simply tired of being told that change is impossible. 

They speak of justice, institutions, dignity and a different kind of politics.

Then, one day, they win. And, that is when the real trouble begins.

Reformist parties around the world weaken for surprisingly similar reasons. The paradox is that the closer they get to power, the harder it becomes to remain reformist.

Parti Keadilan Rakyat (PKR) is Malaysia’s clearest example of this dilemma. 

Its story cannot be separated from Reformasi, the movement that erupted after Anwar Ibrahim was dismissed as deputy prime minister in 1998. 

What began around the political persecution of one man grew into something much bigger. Reformasi came to stand against authoritarianism, abuse of institutions, corruption and the concentration of political power.

For a generation of Malaysians, it represented the possibility that Malaysian politics did not have to remain permanently organised around rules established by those already in power. That history makes PKR’s position extraordinary.

Anwar, once beaten, imprisoned and excluded from the political system, is now prime minister. PKR is no longer knocking on the gates of power. It is sitting inside them.

But reaching power is not the same thing as completing reform.

That is where the tragedy begins.

The first difficulty confronting any reformist party, not just PKR, is mission exhaustion. Reform movements are usually born around something identifiable; an injustice, a crisis, a political enemy. 

That gives them enormous emotional energy. Everyone knows what they are fighting against.

But what happens after the enemy weakens? The question changes from what are we fighting against to what are we building now? The second question is much harder.

PKR experienced this even before Anwar became prime minister. Pakatan Harapan’s historic victory in 2018 ended Barisan Nasional’s uninterrupted federal rule since independence. 

Yet the government lasted only 22 months. The Sheraton Move in February 2020 involved senior PKR figures who broke with the party and helped bring down the PH government. 

A movement that had spent years fighting an entrenched political order discovered that some of its greatest dangers could come from within. 

That should not be surprising. Liberals, social democrats, activists, technocrats, and ambitious politicians can stand together when there is a common enemy. 

The challenge is to remove that enemy and when the differences become harder to conceal.

The departures from PKR of some prominent figures since then give this question a sense of urgency. Rafizi Ramli and Nik Nazmi Nik Ahmad for instance represented, in different ways, another generation of leadership within the party. 

Their departures matter not because PKR has never survived the loss of senior leaders before. It has.

The more difficult question is why people who once helped build, defend or renew a reformist party eventually decide that their political future lies somewhere else. 

That brings us to another problem. Movements eventually become organisations.

Early reform movements depend on idealists, activists and volunteers. Many join at moments when doing so offers no office, position or obvious personal benefit. 

Often, it carries considerable risk. Success changes the incentives. A governing party needs candidates, funding, party machinery, political appointments, hierarchies and discipline. 

It attracts people who may relate to the organisation very differently from those who joined when there was little reward to be had. Movement-building can gradually become career-building.

The people asking how to transform politics begin spending more time asking who gets which position, who controls which division, who becomes a candidate and who succeeds whom.

None of this is uniquely Malaysian.

Greece’s Syriza shows perhaps most clearly how governing can destroy the moral simplicity of reform. Elected in 2015 on a promise to resist austerity, it soon confronted the hard limits of debt, banks, European institutions and the risk of economic collapse. 

After Greek voters overwhelmingly rejected creditors’ bailout terms in a referendum, Alexis Tsipras’s government nevertheless accepted another bailout with severe austerity measures. 

To supporters, it looked like betrayal. But to those governing, it was presented as a necessity. That tension is common to reformist parties.

PKR confronts its own version of this dilemma. The Unity Government formed after Malaysia’s hung parliament in 2022 required Anwar to govern alongside political forces that Reformasi supporters had spent decades opposing. 

There were understandable reasons for doing so. But every necessary compromise carries a political price.

Governing then creates another complication. Spain’s Podemos shows how this can lead to institutionalisation and normalisation. 

Born in 2014 from the indignados and anti-austerity movements, Podemos rose rapidly by challenging Spain’s established political order and entered coalition government with the Socialist Party in 2020. 

But once the outsider became an insider, we witnessed how compromise became routine, internal conflicts deepened and the movement’s distinctiveness weakened. 

By 2023, Podemos was contesting the election within Sumar, a broad alliance of Spain’s alternative left led by Yolanda Díaz. Today, that political space is fragmented again, with Sumar remaining in Sánchez’s coalition government while Podemos has gone its own way. 

South Africa’s African National Congress (ANC) is another different but equally important lesson. The ANC emerged from a liberation struggle against apartheid and carries a historical weight of an entirely different magnitude. 

But precisely because its historical legitimacy was so powerful, its trajectory is instructive. 

For decades the ANC could legitimately remind South Africans of what it had helped destroy. Yet liberation history could not indefinitely compensate for anger over corruption, unemployment, inequality and failing public services. 

In 2024, the ANC lost its parliamentary majority for the first time since South Africa’s democratic transition.

It tells us that historical legitimacy can expire. That may be one of the most difficult lessons for PKR. People eventually stop voting for your history. They vote on what you do with power now.

For Malaysians who lived through 1998, Reformasi carries memories that remain deeply personal. 

But a younger Malaysian voting in the next general election was born years after Anwar’s first imprisonment. The black eye, the demonstrations and the political battles of the late 1990s belong to history. 

A party cannot ask every new generation to inherit somebody else’s political awakening. It has to give them one of their own. 

This is also why founding leaders eventually become a problem for reformist movements, even when those leaders remain politically formidable.

Charismatic figures are enormously useful during periods of struggle. They give a movement a face and help hold it together through repression and defeat. 

But if the movement never develops an identity beyond its founder, the party can eventually become too dependent on one person, making succession harder and its future less certain once that leader is no longer at the centre.

That question now hangs over PKR. Can PKR imagine itself after Anwar? It is not an argument against Anwar’s leadership. 

It is an institutional question every movement eventually has to confront. What political idea remains when the central figure around whom the original struggle was built has finally reached the destination? 

Then, there is Nurul Izzah Anwar. Her recent decision to step down as PKR deputy president carries an almost unavoidable symbolism. 

Hassan Abdul Karim in his comments recently offered a political interpretation of the episode, saying he believed she was uncomfortable with the government’s handling of corruption and with developments within the party and government. 

But Hassan’s warning that “reformasi must not die” is important.

Nurul Izzah is not merely another PKR leader. She is Anwar Ibrahim’s daughter, the daughter of PKR founding president Wan Azizah Wan Ismail, and the figure long known as Puteri Reformasi. 

When the daughter of the man around whom Reformasi erupted, herself as one of its most recognisable symbols, appears uncertain about remaining in the party’s second-highest, people will inevitably ask what the movement has become.

There is an additional burden reformist parties carry. They are punished more heavily for hypocrisy. 

Voters expect establishment parties to compromise. They often expect them to manoeuvre, bargain and protect political interests. 

Reformist parties promised something different. That promise creates a higher standard.

When a reformist government appears selective about corruption, hesitant about institutional reform, comfortable with appointments it might once have questioned, or willing to defend behaviour resembling what it condemned in opposition, the political damage is larger. 

A conventional party can disappoint its voters. A reformist party can disappoint them and simultaneously destroy the very reason they believed in it. 

That is why the problem is not compromise alone. Democracies cannot function without compromise. The problem begins when people can no longer tell what remains non-negotiable. 

Syriza shows what happens when ideals collide with governing constraints. Podemos shows what happens when insurgency becomes institutionalised, fragmented and eventually normalised. 

The ANC shows what happens when historical legitimacy survives longer than public patience. PKR contains elements of all three dilemmas.

But this does not mean PKR is destined to follow any of them. Political parties can reinvent themselves. The question is whether they recognise the need before voters make the decision for them. 

PKR therefore faces a challenge much larger than electoral strategy or leadership succession. It must decide what it is for in a political world very different from the one that created it.

These matter because reformist parties do not usually die in the literal sense. There is another kind of political death. Normalisation is even more dangerous in this sense. 

This is where we see how the party survives and continues to hold seats, contests in elections. Sometimes, it may even remain in government. 

But it stops generating belief. Supporters defend it sometimes merely because the alternative seems worse rather than because the party represents something better.

Eventually, the cruellest ending for a reformist party is not that it is being defeated.

It is when its founding spirits no longer move people.

* Khoo Ying Hooi, PhD is associate professor at Universiti Malaya.

** This is the personal opinion of the writer or publication and does not necessarily represent the views of Malay Mail.