8 March: Eclipsing May 13

1. The Opposition's Year of Living Demonstratively

6 Ooi Kee Beng 1 The Opposition’s Year of Living Demonstratively Ooi Kee Beng Introduction It is quite impossible to deny that Malaysia’s 12th General Elections of March 8, 2008 is a watershed in the country’s history. The significance of that day is monumental in ways that analysts are still discovering months after the fact. For a start, it is difficult for the long-time ruling coalition, the Barisan Nasional (BN), not to blame itself for the surprising losses it suffered. Understanding the rise of the opposition coalition — Pakatan Rakyat (PR, People’s Pact) — requires at least an analysis of the foregoing period of several months and of how a BN that was in possession of a record-strong mandate could so quickly lose so much ground. Just as interestingly, the BN has not shown any capacity to regain ground in the months that followed. The actual campaign period itself — thirteen days — showed how unprepared the BN’s component parties were for elections that they themselves were empowered to call at any time they found suitable. However, an explanation of the surprising results cannot merely focus on the election The Opposition’s Year of Living Demonstratively 7 campaign itself. The events that went before were too significant to disregard, and the activism of opposition forces too focused to ignore. A Year of Living Demonstratively Street rallies in Kuala Lumpur had been on the rise throughout 2007, egged on by a series of by-elections. By the end of that year, these had developed into huge demonstrations. The striking lack of dialogue between protesters and the government, along with the highhanded methods used by the authorities against demonstrators, alienated the activists further from the government and the BN parties. When 2007 — the 50th anniversary year of Malaysia’s independence — began, the opposition had very little going for it. This impression was strengthened as the year progressed by convincing BN victories in a series of by-elections. Already in an earlier by-election held in November 2005 in Pengkalan Pasir, Kelantan, the BN had managed to win a stunning psychological victory by snatching the seat away from the Parti Islam SeMalaysia (PAS), leaving the state government with only a one-seat majority.1 BN seemed invincible then. Its winning streak, which had seen Prime Minister Abdullah Badawi getting a record mandate of 91 per cent of parliamentary seats in April 2004, seemed to have no end. At the next by-election, held in Batu Talam in Pahang in January 2007, PAS and the Parti KeAdilan Rakyat (PKR), both sensing that they had little chance of winning, decided 8 Ooi Kee Beng to shun the whole affair, facilitating in the event an easy win for BN over an independent.2 The opposition quickly learnt from this that such boycotts were a self-defeating tactic. In early April that year, when a by-election was called in Machap in Malacca, the third opposition party, the DemocraticAction Party (DAP), fielded a candidate to fight the BN component party, the Malaysian Chinese Association (MCA). The DAP lost by a huge margin.3 Two weeks after that, another by-election became necessary, this time in Ijok in Selangor, a constituency with a relatively high Indian population. There, the PKR chose Khalid Ibrahim, at that time a well-known corporate figure, to run against K. Parthiban, a candidate from the Malaysian Indian Congress (MIC), another BN component party. Khalid lost, also by a sizeable margin — 1,850 votes. Despite these successes, some signs caused the BN some worry.4 Firstly, Chinese sympathy for the opposition was unexpectedly high in the racially mixed constituency of Machap, an MCA stronghold. Indian support for BN, however, remained strong at 80 per cent, at least according to MIC president S. Samy Vellu. Secondly, cooperation between the opposition parties was impressive. PKR took to the streets in aid of DAP in the Malacca by-election, while both PAS and DAP stood behind PKR at Ijok. In the event, the snap general elections that took place the following year, on March 8, 2008, saw Khalid Ibrahim win the Selangor seat that he had earlier lost by 1,850 votes, with a majority of 1,920 votes. Parthinan, the man who trounced Khalid in the by-election, lost in another constituency, Bukit Melawati, to a PKR man.5 The Opposition’s Year of Living Demonstratively 9 It would seem, therefore...