3 - Consociation and the Electoral Process, 1952–55

Summary

This chapter traces the birth of the Alliance and the establishment of its unique sharing model in the two early pre-Independence elections of 1952 and 1955. In so doing, it will be shown how the Alliance was able to overcome its opponents, particularly the professedly noncommunal forces represented by the Independent Malaya Party (IMP), later Party Negara (PN), and the Islamic and the left-leaning parties. These two early elections paved the way for the Alliance to develop a path-dependent success based on its model of ethnic consociation in subsequent elections after “Merdeka” (Independence) was attained in 1957. In this period of emergent consociational politics, the Alliance was able to establish a first “grand coalition” of the major ethnic groups premised on its basic form of mediated communalism.

In the previous chapter, I sought to establish that Malaysia's electoral system is unique, with its distribution of ethnic political parties and first-past-the-post (FPTP), single-member constituency system. Despite obvious flaws, electoral politics has been broadly anchored to elements of procedural democracy such as transparent and autonomous electoral institutions and procedures, freedom of political association and campaigning, guaranteed by law based on the Constitution. By and large, electoral politics and competition with the oversight of an Election Commission had remained relatively free and fair until the late 1960s. It was only after the 1969 general election, which saw the eruption of racial riots in Kuala Lumpur, that a host of restrictions and constraints were placed on electoral processes and a more authoritarian state structure was instituted. The evaluation of the electoral system by a notable group of Malaysia specialists seems to confirm this broad view:

The general conclusion reached in this assessment of the current state of Malaysia's electoral system is that Malaysian elections cannot be considered reasonably free and fair because they do not fulfill the functions required of them in formal democratic theory — or at least that our elections have become, over the years since the 1960s, rather less free and fair than they once were, and that they now are much less free and fair than they might or should be. (Puthucheary and Othman 2005, p. 14)