Just Lost an Election? Join the Winning Side

Just Lost an Election? Join the Winning Side

By Chin-Huat Wong

Mr. Wong is a Malaysian political scientist.

KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia — Call them “hoppers,” call them “frogs,” as soon as the surprise outcome of Malaysia’s recent election became clear, politicians from the losing parties started jumping over to the winners’ side. The moment the long-ruling coalition Barisan Nasional was voted out of power on May 9, it started to disintegrate.

But even with Pakatan Harapan, a collection of long-suffering underdog parties, now in charge, the mass defections already are endangering Malaysia’s democracy: The system risks swinging from being dominated by one overbearing coalition to being dominated by another overbearing coalition.

When ballot counting ended on May 10, the morning after the election, Pakatan Harapan (and its regional ally in the state of Sabah) had won 122 out of 222 seats in the lower house of Parliament. That camp now controls 126 seats, after members of Barisan Nasional and putative allies jumped ship.

The uptick may seem marginal, but it reveals a much broader trend that has troubling implications.

May 9 was also voting day for the assemblies of 12 of Malaysia’s 13 states. According to the initial results, Pakatan Harapan won five of those, Barisan Nasional won two (down from nine) and the Islamist party known as Pas won two. No single party won a majority in Kedah, Perak or Sabah.

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Yet soon enough Pakatan Harapan was able to form governments in all three states — in Perakand, most spectacularly, Sabah, that was thanks to defections from Barisan Nasional. In fact, in Sabah, on the island of Borneo, two chief ministers were sworn in within 48 hours: Barisan Nasional won 29 of the 60 seats in the state assembly and formed a coalition government with a local party — until six of its members defected, allowing Pakatan Harapan and its local ally to take over.

Even the 13th state, Sarawak, also on Borneo, which didn’t vote on May 9 because it held its elections in 2016, might swing: Barisan Nasional remains in charge for now, but its local allies reportedly are contemplating forming an independent coalition.

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Defections are nothing new in Malaysian politics, and their dangers are familiar. Civil-society activists and members of Pakatan Harapan itself are now arguing that crossovers violated the popular mandate voters had handed to their chosen candidates, whatever the camp. They can also corrupt, the former minister Rais Yatim has warned: “If PH accepts into its fold everyone who feels pushed into a corner, then it would create BN 2.0, with all its destructive behavior.”

Worse, postelection defections threaten democracy by suppressing political competition both inside the new ruling coalition and outside it — and that in turn often induces the opposition to adopt more hard-line positions.

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Many Malaysians vote according to their ethnicity, for parties they feel represent them on that basis. But since not all parties stand a chance of getting elected in every constituency, they have to forge long-term alliances among themselves and then convince supporters to vote for their allies. This arrangement gives party leaders a lot of power, especially in their selection of local candidates, and selection decisions often hinge more on loyalty than merit — undermining the a coalition’s electability in the long run.

As its competitiveness waned over the years, Barisan Nasional — particularly its leading party, the United Malays National Organization, or UMNO — compensated with extensive patronage (barely veiled attempts to buy votes) and repression (blatantly trying to disadvantage opposition supporters). To overcome infighting within its ranks, it maneuvered to add seats in federal and state legislatures and redelineate voting districts to its advantage. It pacified party members who weren’t put up as candidates with government appointments or contracts.

So, yes, Barisan Nasional was corrupt and illiberal — but it became that way partly in response to structural features in Malaysia’s political system that, when mapped onto the country’s ethnic and religious divisions, naturally, if paradoxically, create a distance over time between parties in broad coalitions and their constituents. Like the United States and Britain, Malaysia has a first-past-the-post voting system. But in a society as diverse and as divided as this one — Muslim-Malays make up about 60 percent of the population, and Chinese and Indian combined a little less than 30 percent — its operation can have perverse effects.

Another example: Coalition politics under Barisan Nasional pushed opposition parties to harden their positions as they struggled to remain viable.

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Take the evolution of Pas, the main Islamist party, over the years, as it responded to UMNO’s claim to be the sole party capable of defending the interests of Muslim-Malays. Race riots in 1969 brought Pas and UMNO together — only for Pas to pull out of Barisan Nasional in the late 1970s as UMNO wrested away its stronghold state, Kelantan.

By 1981, Pas was countering UMNO’s Muslim-Malay nationalism by attacking the ruling coalition for preserving a “colonial constitution, infidel laws and pre-Islamic rules” — in effect challenging the very legitimacy of modern Malaysia as a nation-state. And it intensified its calls to apply Shariah throughout the country.

In response, Mahathir Mohamad (now the new prime minister; then also prime minister, but under the UMNO banner) enlisted Anwar Ibrahim (today the leader of Pakatan Harapan’s anchor party, but at the time a charismatic young Islamist also with UMNO) to rebrand UMNO as the standard-bearer of a modernist form of Islamization — promoting Islamic universities, Islamic banking and Islamic bureaucracies.

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One result of this tug of war over how to promote Islam in politics is that if the notion of making Shariah the official law of Malaysia was a fringe idea in the late 1980s, by 2013, 86 percent of Malaysian Muslims supported it, according to a study by the Pew Research Center.

Some people celebrate this month’s election as marking Malaysia’s move away from communal politics, pointing to the fact that Pakatan Harapan, a diverse grouping of parties representing different ethnic groups, has downplayed communal issues to focus on national matters, like corruption and an unpopular tax on goods and services. But they are overlooking some facts: Pas secured nearly 18 percent of the popular vote, 18 seats in the lower house of Parliament and control of two state governments.

Though Pas had done better at the federal level in previous elections, these are impressive results considering that it joined forces with Barisan Nasional in recent years: It appears not to have been too tainted by the association. Pas now has little reason to moderate its core stances — and UMNO may have more reason to endorse them.

Likewise, Barisan Nasional’s indigenous parties in Sabah and Sarawak may be tempted to double down on their traditional appeal to historical grievances in the two Bornean states — poverty, marginalization and exploitation by the central government — and harden their calls for greater autonomy and someday perhaps even separatism.

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Reacting to such concerns, Mr. Mahathir has recently said that new defectors would not automatically be granted formal membership in Pakatan Harapan. But that measure will only slow down, rather than stop, Pakatan Harapan’s slide toward becoming another overbearing ruling coalition, unless a healthy opposition can be groomed outside Pakatan Harapan.

It is unlikely that Barisan Nasional as we know it will last through the year: not only because of its searing loss in the election, but also because of the likely fallout ahead from the scandals embroiling the former prime minister Najib Razak. Much may depend on whether UMNO can oversee a changing of the guard during its next party election, currently scheduled for June 30.

But much more depends on Pakatan Harapan.

After the 1970s, Barisan Nasional essentially turned Malaysia into an electoral one-party state. To prevent that from occurring again, the new government will eventually have to dismantle the country’s winner-takes-all system. A proportional electoral system is needed to cut across the country’s ethnoreligious and regional identities. Decentralizing and devolving more authority to the states, as well as restoring city elections, could also encourage moderation among opposition parties by offering them more opportunities to have some executive powers and access to resources.

In the meantime, Malaysians must realize that there can be no good government if there is no good opposition. And Pakatan Harapan must realize that the best thing it can do for Malaysia’s democracy is what Barisan Nasional never did: protect its adversaries.

Chin-Huat Wong is a political scientist with the Penang Institute, a state-government think tank.