IDENTITY POLITICS A LATENT POLITICAL PHENOMENON
Such politics should be moulded so that it productively serves each country’s specific needs
OUR near neighbours Thailand, Indonesia and the Philippines underwent national electoral contests in recent months. By all indications, they were all rather wrenching exercises and none offers much comfort as to the political health of each of the respective countries.
It was only some two months after the Thai elections — the first held after its latest military coup — that an unwieldy coalition led by the nation’s soldiersturned-politicians was cobbled together for a new government.
The most notable feature of the new Thai government is probably that it managed to rope the country’s most established political party — the Democrat Party — in, but possibly at huge costs. Its youthful leader and a former prime minister, Abhisit Vejjajiva, resigned in the aftermath of the party’s dismal electoral showing and another former party leader and ex-prime minister, 80-yearold Chuan Leekpai, was elected the new parliamentary speaker.
Traditional parties of a seemingly bygone era such as the Thai Democrats are having to adapt quickly to changed political circumstances enveloping not just the region but, indeed, the entire globe, including the advanced democratic West, in order to stay relevant.
Indonesia’s reformist President Joko Widodo swept back into a second term but not without having to resist rather strong political headwinds from retired General Prabowo Subianto. The rise of conservative Islam meant Joko needed to protect his relatively liberal flank by choosing a religious leader as his vice-presidential running mate.
Prabowo is not retreating quietly after his second presidential defeat, promising that a clear path for entrenching the incumbent’s reformist agenda in the
coming five years is far from a sure thing.
As with Thailand’s Democrat Party, its closest counterpart in the Philippines, the Liberal Party, is nursing a mauling at the hands of President Rodrigo Duterte’s populist bandwagon in the country’s May mid-term elections. Duterte’s Liberal presidential rival, Manuel Roxas II, did not even make the cut to win back a seat in the Philippine Senate.
The roiling electoral scene in three major countries of our region reflects the current state prevailing in much of the democratic world, with populists on the political ascendancy in the United States, Brazil and possibly, even in the United Kingdom.
While much is said about the political inroads made by political Islam in Muslim-majority democracies such as Malaysia, Indonesia and Turkey, much less is written about how the impact of Christian fundamentalists played outsized roles in the most recent US and Brazilian elections.
Even in predominantly Roman Catholic Philippines, Duterte has been careful to cultivate the bloc votes of major Protestant churches while simultaneously publicly ridiculing the Catholic Church and its clergy.
Given the prevailing grim politics in much of the democratic world, Malaysia, which has always been something of a political outlier, may in fact be more of an oasis of relative calm.
Our major political party up until just over a year ago — Umno — has been an unabashedly populist and remarkably successful political force. It was no counterpart to regional grand old parties in the mould of Thailand’s Democrats or the Philippines’ Liberals. Our closest to the latter regional peer parties is Gerakan, which, like its two neighbouring counterparts, is currently fighting to stay relevant politically.
PKR may be aspiring to fill in the shoes of these latter parties but even when circumstances were probably at their most propitious, it had to ride on the coattails of Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad to eke out a winning majority in the last general election.
Our coalition politics may not be wholly satisfactory for our people some of the time but it has the eminently redeeming side-effect of affording us the stability that allowed us to advance economically, which our fractured polity might otherwise deny us.
Identity-based politics may not be the most inspiring, but its return as the dominant force in democratic politics the world over probably reveals that it has always been a latent world-wide political phenomenon.
The real political answer — as Malaysia has proven over the decades — is not so much to deny such politics as a malevolent development to be abhorred but rather to mould it so that it productively serves each country’s specific needs.
Many who despair over the state of global democratic politics today still harbour hopes of a return to “sanity” in a postTrump world or a post-Duterte region. Astute observers may be closer to reality when they advise that a return to what used to be is near-impossible.