JULY 11 — Not long ago I published a two-part commentary discussing the outcome, and implications as I saw them, of Malaysia’s recent 13th national election (GE13).
That analysis proved controversial to some. It required a response by me to an ensuing two-part critique by an unnamed author that appeared here in Malaysia in “The Choice”, a website that appears to have some friendly association with the media and communications team working for the Prime Minister’s office.
In addition to that rejoinder, I also offered separately some brief words of amendment and correction.
These corrections were duly published both where my election analysis originally appeared, in the “New Mandala” whose home is at the Australian National University in Canberra, and also in the form of a letter to Malaysiakini, which had picked up and reproduced my commentary from that Australian source.
But those corrections, though sent, did not appear in The Malaysian Insider, the site where they had attracted the stern attention of my critics at “The Choice”.
The problem
The main problem in my original analysis that required the offering of some corrections was kindly pointed out to me by Andrew Khoo.
I had miscalculated and misstated the number of Umno’s peninsular parliamentary delegation, or elected representation, that had just been chosen at GE13.
How this error came about is itself an interesting story or footnote. I had been using a website that provided some very helpful summary data, in both numerical and graphic form, of the GE13 election results.
This presentation was elegant, comprehensive and most useful. So rather than separately recording for myself all those details immediately, I wrote my analysis and then returned to the website in order to fill in all the final details and complete my commentary. Or I tried to do so.
When I did, I found that the information, and elegant data presentation, that I had quite recently been using were no longer available.
This came as a shock. It seemed puzzling, bizarre.
Why had this comprehensive summary now been withdrawn?
Because, it was strangely suggested, the GE13 election results were now being readied for official gazetting, so there was no longer any need to make them separately available. More, the view seemed to be, they should not appear or continue to be made available elsewhere while the process of gazetting was under way.
Why not? I would have thought just the opposite. That, I would have imagined, is precisely when people might need, and want to have, some fast, simple and reliable access to those data. But that, I suppose, is just my quaint and foreign view.
Faced with that bewildering situation, I hurriedly tried to “pull together” the numbers that I needed from other sources to complete my commentary.
In doing so, I made some small errors of counting and classification. But not uniquely. I was not alone. Others, I later noticed, had made similar mistakes in their summaries and analyses.
This error does not simply require some explicit correction “for the record”. It also warrants some additional analytical comment.
Errors of detail, not interpretation
The overall analysis that I offered of the GE13 election results was that they were paradoxical.
BN had come out even weaker than before (now with 133 of 222 seats, as against 140 at GE12 in 2008). But Umno domination of the governing BN coalition, of Parliament, public policy and national life generally had, perhaps oddly, been enhanced.
How? Because while BN’s total numbers were down, Umno increased its numbers from 79 to 88, or about two-thirds of the total BN delegation of 133. And because support for Umno’s long-term coalition partner parties on the peninsula — the MCA and MIC, going back to pre-independence times, and, since the 1970s, the Gerakan — and with it their parliamentary representation had almost totally collapsed.
Together these three “old allies” parties now held only 12 seats. In its peninsular homeland, I remarked, BN seemed like an old club with just one surviving member, dutifully attended by a few bemused janitors or caretakers.
Umno’s main support, I suggested, now resides not with its old peninsular coalition allies, but with its newer partners from east Malaysia. These, I suggested might prove fractious, even at times difficult to manage. But they were themselves divided into a number of often contentious and mutually suspicious smaller parties. Their mutual rivalries might make them easier for an astute Umno leadership to control.
After GE13, more even than before, I suggested, the Umno’s ability to head a government, and rule over the nation’s core in Peninsular Malaysia and the nation as a whole, now rests disproportionately upon the seats that its fractious east Malaysian partners hold in Sarawak and Sabah.
Umno’s task will be to satisfy, appease and manage its increasingly assertive, and at times even restive, east Malaysian partners who now so heavily underwrite BN’s, and hence Umno’s, ability to rule.
But provided it can do that, in numerical and political terms Umno now dominates — perhaps as never before — the national government.
Provided it can decide without internal strife what it wants to do, provided it “knows its own mind”, it will be in a powerful position in the years ahead to have its way on all significant political and policy issues, so long as its Sabah and Sarawak allies can be kept “in line”.
In national government, an era of unprecedented Umno domination — and, very likely, an era of increasing, and increasingly Islamising and even Islamist, Malay political assertion — may now, I concluded, be in the offing.
This analysis and interpretation, these conclusions, still stand.
They are not adversely affected or compromised in any way by the numerical errors made in my original computation of Umno’s parliamentary numbers.
On the contrary, the numbers, when correctly presented, may even lend further strength to that analysis and those conclusions.
So it is worthwhile and necessary to look again at, and now to state correctly, the numbers on the floor of the Dewan Rakyat as they were decided at GE13 on May 5 (and before any appeals and petitions may be entertained by the relevant judicial authorities to overturn any of those results).
Party representation in the Dewan Rakyat after GE13
The basic numbers tell the main story.
First: In the peninsula BN holds 85 of 165 seats, and the opposition Pakatan Rakyat (PR)coalition 80. A “whisker” of a difference. But, in politics, any majority is a majority. The question is what you make of it, and what you are permitted to do by your opponents.
Second: In Labuan, Sabah and Sarawak BN won 48 seats and PR 9. No matter how it came about or was achieved, that is a vast difference. The result is the result. And here it is a decisive one.
Third: So overall, the numbers “on the floor of the Dewan Rakyat” as decided on May 5 are BN 133 and PR 89. Not a two-thirds majority but a very comfortable one.
Or so it would be gratefully received in most parliamentary democracies.
And, a comfortable majority that exists and may operate not with the constant haggling and crises of a “hung Parliament”, but one where the ruling coalition is dominated by one strong, centrally placed, deeply entrenched governing party, Umno.
Umno towers virtually unchallengeable over everybody else, and even more so on its own side of the house, over its tiny partners, than over the three main parties standing opposite it, its adversaries. (Overall, the DAP has 37 seats, PKR 31 and PAS 21 — this last and smallest opposition number outweighing by one-half again the 14 members of PBB, the second largest BN coalition member after Umno.)
Fourth: The origins and composition of the BN majority marshalled by Umno are significant and revealing.
That majority is made up as follows:
(a) Peninsular Malaysia
Umno 73
MCA 7
MIC 4
Gerakan 1
(b) Labuan, Sabah & Sarawak
Umno 15
UPKO/PBS/PBRS 8
SPDP/PBB/SUPP/PRS 25
(c) Total 133
Fifth: Overall, peninsular Umno holds 73 of the 88 Umno seats nationally (and of 133 BN seats nationwide). It holds 73 of the 85 seats that BN won of a total of 165 seats in Peninsular Malaysia.
Sixth: So we may speak of an Umno-led, Umno-centred or Umno-dominated “governing bloc”. This consists of:
Umno in Peninsular Malaysia 73
Umno in Labuan, Sabah and Sarawak 15
MCA 7
MIC 4
Gerakan 1
UPKO/PBS/PBRS 8
SPDP/PBB/SUPP/PRS 25
Seventh: The nature of this “governing bloc”, its domination by one partner — a “triton among the minnows”, or in Malay terms we might say a tiger among the “little deers” — is made even clearer when the member parties of this “governing bloc” are listed not by place of origin but in their order of relative size.
The ranking is as follows:
Umno, Peninsular Malaysia 73
Umno, Labuan, Sarawak and Sabah 15
Umno, total overall 88
PBB 14
MCA 7
PRS 6
MIC 4
PBS 4
SPDP 4
UPKO 3
Gerakan 1
PBRS 1
SUPP 1
Taken separately, Peninsular Umno and Sabah and Labuan Umno are the parties with the greatest and second greatest parliamentary presence.
Third overall, or when those first two are taken together, the second largest is the dominant party in Sarawak, the PBB. A long-term Umno ally and component of the BN coalition, it is a party with, at the formal doctrinal level, a strong “nativist” or “Bumiputera-ist” orientation and outlook.
Of all the BN’s other post-GE13 partner parties it is not only by far the largest (boasting twice the parliamentary presence of the “old loyalist” but now very tattered MCA). It is also the partner party with the closest affinity, in ideological and political terms, with the Umno’s own stance, inclinations and preferences.
Together these two (or three) dominate all others numerically, and are in a position to do so politically. Provided they stick together, they can easily do that. They are in a position to control the entire parliamentary show, and all that goes with it.
The machinery of government — of key decision-making, routine administration and forward-oriented policy-formation — is theirs. If they are in concord, they can set the terms of national life.
“When the eagles are agreed,” Bismarck observed, “the sparrows must remain silent.”
The power of the weak
If Umno and the rest of BN cannot keep PBB happy and agreeable, its leaders will have to call increasingly on the support — from issue to issue and occasion to occasion, even crisis to crisis — of the smaller BN partner parties in Sarawak and Sabah.
Umno may even need to call upon their active backing together with that of PBB as it seeks to insist upon having its way against its old peninsular partner parties from the pre-independence and Alliance Party days. For example, if and when it finds itself facing up to, and wishing to face down, the MCA and MIC on the unilateral religious conversion of minors question.
In that way Umno may be able, by calling upon some elements of that “small-party” support of the East, to dominate, and even override the resistance of, its old peninsular allies on some key, chosen issues.
But in doing so Umno risks making itself vulnerable, and over time ever more vulnerable, to the importuning tactics and “strategic sulking” of some of its east Malaysian partners, whose distinctive fears and resentments, though often hidden, are always both latent and potent.
If all of them were ever to decide, at the same time, to be unhappy with Umno, the BN head could find himself in a very difficult position. Any and every Malaysian prime minister heading BN, one can be sure, will be very careful to ensure that this kind of thing never happens. At what price?
In running their always tricky show, Umno and BN must be careful never to allow themselves to fall into the grip of the weak and small but indispensable.
If they do, they will be made painfully to learn the strength, and the stresses, of “veto group politics”. They are already being dealt enough of a lesson on that score in peninsular politics by the indulged malcontents in Perkasa. No more east Malaysian tutorials are required.
Domination by the weakened and the weak
The legacy of GE13 is a paradoxical or anomalous one. It provides the spectacle of enhanced domination by a weakened BN, led by an Umno that looms large, even gargantuan, over all its partners but which at other times — while fancying itself as the institutional epitome of the “towering Malay” — often seems to stagger along like a tottering old giant.
It has been shorn of much of the significant, and long indispensable, support that its long-time partners MCA, MIC and Gerakan were able to “pull in” for the Umno-led BN in the nation’s traditional peninsular heartland states.
They can no longer provide that support. The terms of their continuing subordination to Umno, within BN, have cost them their public “face” and political credibility.
More, despite all the embittered talk of a “Chinese tsunami”, it is clear that a turn away from the BN government at GE13 was a far more widespread phenomenon or tendency in many of the peninsular states, and one that, though uneven, was spread across and through many sectors of Malaysian society, not only its Chinese component.
Even the long-term support of the increasingly diversified, urbanised, individualistic, non-deferential and modernised Malay majority in the peninsula, or at least key parts of it, is no longer assured.
Ensuring that peninsular Malay society remains loyal to Umno and BN, without imprisoning most of its inhabitants in rural backwaters and in a narrow and sentimentally “archaising” Malay cultural mindset, will be a huge challenge. It seems one, alas, that the Umno’s main vehicle of political communication, its Utusan Malaysia newspaper, seems determined to refuse.
How long it can continue to do so — as the “old Malay world” with all its conventional attitudes, and its recurrent susceptibility to being stampeded by “moral panics” and fears of Malay political and social obliteration, continues to shrink and fall apart — seems unclear.
Sooner or later Umno, if it wishes to survive, will have to discover a new role and direction for Utusan, or else replace it with something entirely different.
But meanwhile, as its non-Malay support in the Peninsula wanes and its base in the “old Malay world” narrows and perhaps begins to wither away, Umno and its BN are already looking in other directions. They are becoming, even at this stage and now more than ever after GE13, increasingly dependent for their everyday parliamentary strength and political survival on their support from the East.
Malaysia as a whole now seems to be ever more strongly in the grip of a weakened BN. But of a BN, and its Umno leadership, now at risk, more than ever, of being subject to the whims and demands of the ruling coalition’s smaller and weaker eastern partner parties.
A case, in short, of a nation dominated by the weakened and of a government potentially at the mercy of the weak; one made hostage to its importuning weaker members. It is not a reassuring outlook.
East Malaysia, Umno leaders have at times unwisely boasted, has been their “fixed deposit”. Their nest egg. Their reserve of resources to be drawn upon in tough times, at times of crisis. It is one upon which Umno has made itself increasingly reliant, even dependent.
But to call things by their proper names, east Malaysian support is better seen not as a “fixed deposit” but as a “safety net”. One that is now called increasingly into play as a once virtuoso old performer in the national political circus ages, loses his agility, and becomes ever more prone to stumbling and falling — not least because of his own internal ambivalences and spiritual discord.
George Canning recalled
In 1826 George Canning, the English Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs (and soon, though only briefly, prime minister), boasted of one of his greatest diplomatic coups.
Spain had decided to make an alliance with France, one that was to England’s disadvantage but which it could not prevent.
So Canning played a master stroke.
He cleared the way for Spain’s Latin American colonies to go their own way. To choose not to join Spain in its alliance with France.
With this virtuoso manoeuvre — one inspired by cynicism or at best “Realpolitik”, not idealism — Canning took a decisive first step in opening up the space in which the remote, subordinated and often dominated colonies of the great European powers might begin to play an independent role of their own in international politics and world society.
It was the beginning, if you like, of Third World autonomy and activism in international affairs.
Canning’s strike at France improbably produced the initial imperial midwifing of the “Bandung spirit” that was to be born in 1955 and of the United Nations as we know it today.
Of his deft ploy, in inviting the Spanish colonies to abandon their colonial motherland and strike out diplomatically on their own, Canning boasted:
“I called the new world into existence to redress the balance in the old.”
Inspired by Canning, the Umno leadership — as it surveys the party’s post-GE13 parliamentary dominance but contemplates its political isolation, now bereft of the vanished support of its exhausted long-term allies in peninsular politics — might now similarly say:
“We have called upon our strengths and support in east Malaysia to offset our emerging weaknesses and our now near total lack of strong allies in west Malaysia. We have called upon the East to redress and shore up a political imbalance in the West.”
Canning’s virtuoso stroke gave birth to a whole new world of which he himself cannot possibly have any inkling or imagination.
What was to happen far exceeded both his intentions and his vision.
Will the same, in future years, apply to and be said of Umno and its “drive to the East”?
* Clive Kessler is Emeritus Professor of Sociology and Anthropology at the University of New South Wales, Sydney.
* This is the personal opinion of the writer or publication and does not necessarily represent the views of The Malay Mail Online.
