Solace amid unpredictability

The outcome of Ge15 will hopefully produce a government that all malaysians can accept as legitimate.

“A LACK of enthusiasm and an air of unpredictability,” I was going to write, but the final stretch of campaigning ahead of our 15th General Election (GE15) has accelerated precipitously.

Fake polls are being purposely distributed, there are furious party splits with internal sabotage, and palpable enthusiasm from leaders and supporters. They really think they are going to win!

Still, most pundits and psephologists have more caveats than usual this time.

Three factors are particularly important.

Firstly, the over six million new voters as a result of the lowering of the voting age to 18 and automatic voter registration.

Will the low turnout of the Johor election of March 2021 be repeated? My anecdotal evidence suggests that the generation who get their news from Tiktok are keeping their cards close to their chest.

Parents have told me their newly- qualified children are keen to vote, and have discussed politics and current affairs at home, but not revealed their preference.

One 18-year-old bluntly said: “Papa, my vote is secret!” and the father (with simultaneous feelings of pride and regret) did not ask again.

This precisely is the vindication for lowering the voting age, and if replicated in households across the country, is an extremely healthy development.

All children should feel comfortable and confident to discuss politics, and to have their opinions and choices respected. Being able to live together while having disagreements is at the heart of a democracy, and once such attitudes are normalised in the home, they will become normalised in wider society too.

Secondly, this is the first time that so many coalitions and parties with candidates who have already served as ministers will be contesting against each other.

It won’t just be lofty promises, but actual experiences that will be compared. The last general election broke an important psychological barrier – it is possible to vote for the Opposition! – but now that consideration will be based on track records.

True, for some voters, racial and religious sentiments will still be of foremost importance. But even then, when so many competing parties are chanting “Hidup Melayu!”, the candidates themselves draw attention to their own competence and reliability, and the policy differences in the manifestos.

This has helped fuel news platforms and social media influencers who analyse and debate these policy differences. This in turn normalises the idea that these other aspects matter in choosing who should represent us.

Thirdly, the unprecedented distinctions between personalities and parties. With so many MPS switching sides prior to the Anti-party Hopping Act, voters will also have to decide whether their loyalties lie with individual candidates or the parties they represent.

In some cases, individuals may be so popular (or deemed to have justifiably changed sides) that they will survive the taint of being a frog. In other cases, loyalty to the party logo still trumps all else.

And perhaps in one or two cases, the candidate is known to be at odds with his/her own party, and so a dilemma arises in that the individual may be desired but his/her party leader, who could become prime minister, is not.

In my first article on this topic written after GE12 in 2008, I wrote that the Federal Constitution assumes we elect individuals, not mere unthinking slaves of a political party: the instances of partyhopping and the passing of the anti-party hopping law have added more complexion to that.

But still, it is impossible to accurately calculate all the permutations of what could happen, and thus, the general principle should be to fill Parliament with the best individuals, for it is from this population that our government will be formed.

With the establishment of Parliamentary Select Committees and Allparty Parliamentary Groups, the capacity of individual MPS has become even more relevant.

But more broadly, it is likely that stability in Malaysian politics going forward will not be achieved through super majorities by any one entity. Rather, it will be achieved through coalition-building and working across the aisle with encouragement from civil society, other institutions, and, as during Covid-19, the Yang di-pertuan Agong, too.

The parliamentary arithmetic after the dust settles may test this theory further.

In the meantime, there have also been despicable instances of violent disruptions to ceramah, vandalism of posters and the use of racial slurs.

Hopefully, this reflects only the desperation of bigots who are frustrated that most voters have moved on from tribal loyalties, and instead are assessing the various reasons to mark their X.

Monsoon rain or not, we may have a deluge of doubt come Sunday. I pray our flood defences and drainage systems – our institutions – work well to clear those waters and leave a government that all Malaysians can accept as legitimate.