DECEMBER 15 — When Prime Minister Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim formed a coalition government three years back, my AuDHD brain went; “Ah yes, this rabbit hole seems familiar”. It was like watching another remake of Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, with someone who looked strangely like Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad as the ghost of Christmas past.
T’was 2010 in the United Kingdom, when the general election gave them the first hung parliament in 36 years. David Cameron, suddenly without a majority, found himself negotiating like a man trying to buy a large basket of durian at your local pasar malam. He managed to stitch together a coalition, and promptly ended Labour’s 13-year reign.
Enter Nick Clegg: Liberal Democrat leader, golden boy of the moment. Bright-eyed, clean-cut, the political equivalent of a promising sous-chef stepping into a kitchen fire. He took the deal, became deputy prime minister, smiled for the cameras outside Number 10 and walked straight into history’s woodchipper. There was the distinct smell of political dynamite waiting to go off. And by 2015, it did. Spectacularly.
The Lib Dems, once the nation’s favourite third wheel, were decimated, losing 48 of their 56 seats in what can only be described as a political mugging. The party has been staggering about in a daze ever since, trying to remember where it last put its dignity. Even in 2019, Jo Swinson, their fresh-faced leader, was promptly ejected from her own seat.
Public support for the Lib Dems didn’t just dip after the 2010 coalition agreement, it nosedived into the abyss of history. Within a month, the goodwill evaporated. Four years later, they were clinging to a miserable 8 per cent approval rating. Less “viable political force,” more “ghost of decisions past.”
A 2015 Parliamentary Affairs essay from the Hansard Society read like an autopsy. It concluded that the Lib Dems had forgotten what they were supposed to be. It had abandoned the thing that made them matter: their role as the scrappy, inconvenient opposition. Instead, they became the human shield for public anger, absorbing every ounce of public distrust and irritation directed at the government.
A year into the coalition, the Lib Dems were losing by-elections and local contests with the sort of consistency normally reserved for doomed football clubs. Once the bold urban challengers to Labour, they collapsed into an electoral crater. Their weakest performance in three decades.
And the cause? A betrayal felt in the bones of every centre-left voter who’d once believed in them. These voters had supported the Lib Dems as an antidote to Labour. These were the people who’d backed the Lib Dems precisely because they weren’t the Conservatives. But when the party decided to join the coalition government, the outrage wasn’t just political. It was personal. They saw the party as having abandoned its mission and identity. Becoming utterly pointless.
The Lib Dems didn’t just lose votes. They lost their base’s trust.
As history’s natural instinct would have it, its wheels start turning, grinding, repeating its cruel little jokes. And so it seems the same fate has come knocking at the door of the DAP weeks after the Sabah state election wrapped up. The bruises are still fresh, the wounds still raw, the taste still metallic in the mouth.
Ding Lee Leong, former editor-in-chief of Oriental Daily, put it with the sort of clarity that doesn’t ask for permission. In his analysis, he wrote: “DAP did not merely lose seats. It lost the people’s trust so completely that even basic political sympathy evaporated. When a party collapses and the public responds not with concern but with applause, it means one thing: the public has already walked away.”
I exhaled slowly, letting that sit. Letting it sting.
Ding’s piece landed more than a week after DAP’s Central Executive Committee (CEC) huddled deep into the night, slicing and dissecting the anatomy of what can only be described as a humiliating defeat in Sabah.
Their midnight statement carried a message that was polite in tone but sharp at the edges: the prime minister would be given six months to accelerate the reform agenda. Read between the lines and it sounded less like a reminder and more like a finger jabbed into the chest. Perhaps even a veiled threat to walk away from the unity government should those reforms be ignored.
DAP secretary-general Anthony Loke later moved to clarify. Yes, DAP would reconsider its role in government if its calls went unanswered. But no, this did not mean withdrawing support for the Madani Government or lighting the fuse on yet another political bonfire.
Because, frankly, Anthony knows this as well as anyone: Anwar Ibrahim is not a man who responds well to knives held at his throat. If anything, Anwar likely smiled. The knowing, unbothered grin of a veteran who has survived far worse. He knows DAP will not dare to pull the plug, let alone surrender ministerial posts and invite other parties to stroll in and fill the gaps in a coalition that remains remarkably porous.
It is, after all, an open secret that Anwar has on more than one occasion courted PAS into his cabinet. Warisan, meanwhile, now looks firmly entrenched in Sabah. A coalition featuring PAS and Warisan, rather than DAP, would arguably give Anwar something far more valuable than moral posturing. It would give Anwar a sturdier, more solid grip on power.
And without DAP, MCA would not even need to leave Barisan Nasional to step neatly into the vacant role of representing Chinese interests within the Madani framework. Anwar will almost positively confirm a victory in the next GE, ushered by the blow of Malay serunai and nafiri, backed by the support from Green Wave voters who’d like nothing more than to see DAP completely decimated, and pushed back to the opposition bloc.
Politics, like food and history, has a long memory. And right now, the kitchen smells different.
“Change happens fast or immediate,” said a friend, alluding to recent developments. “The DAP’s golden era is over.” He remarks, painfully.
Within a week of that CEC meeting, DAP abruptly changed its face. The gloves came off, the old snarl seemingly returned. Suddenly the party was making demands again. Even its most senior leaders, comfortably seated in Anwar’s cabinet, began making public ultimatums, as if the prime minister were some distant headmaster unreachable except through megaphones and press statements.
Then came the biggest bomb. The minister of local government, who also happens to be DAP’s national deputy chairman, went straight for the jugular by announcing to the nation that the party was once again demanding recognition of the UEC, a call swiftly echoed by other party leaders. The polemic flared hot and fast, scorching the nerves of Umno leaders and forcing the prime minister himself to respond in a manner that felt very much like a bucket of cold water thrown squarely in DAP’s face.
Yes, the struggle to recognise the UEC has been in DAP’s bloodstream for generations. So too has the demand for justice for the late Teoh Beng Hock, who died while under MACC interrogation.
But let’s be honest. If not for the Sabah defeat and the panicked lurch to “accelerate reforms”, one has to wonder when, exactly, DAP would have remembered the UEC it has long claimed to champion. And that, right there, is where the tremor of arrogance set in. The kind that irritates everyone, especially DAP’s own core voters.
“How do you think we can turn the ship around?” a party friend asked me just a day or two ago.
I told them the truth. It is far too late for this ship, having drifted so badly off course, to simply spin around and sail home. There are things that could still be done, perhaps, but time is a jealous mistress and she is not on the party’s side. Heck it might not even be excessive to say that DAP may not recover for another 10 or 20 years, if public trust and hope have truly evaporated beyond recall.
Come GE16, core DAP voters may simply stay home. Or worse, they may walk into the booth and mark their ballots for MCA, or even Gerakan for that matter. Even the Bentong seat might be gone, if MCA is smart enough.
DAP’s silence on issues gnawing at Chinese voters and Malaysia’s so-called middle ground, from Datuk Seri Ahmad Zahid Hamidi’s DNAA, to the extension of Tan Sri Azam Baki’s contract, to the steady drip of corruption scandals under the Madani government will leave long shadows. The party has already seen how that episode ends, played out at the ballot boxes in Sabah.
If only now, after three long years, DAP wishes to reclaim the role it had seemed to have abandoned, the party should brace itself for the loss of many seats and for a long, cold return to life as the opposition.
* Izmil Amri is the former editor of DAP’s own Roketkini.
** This is the personal opinion of the writer or publication and does not necessarily represent the views of Malay Mail.
