10 - Transitions of Coalition Politics circa 2016

Summary

Malaysia's electoral history, if one cared to examine it more minutely, has been strewn with liminal shifts of coalition politics from the 1950s onwards, as I have tried to show in preceding chapters of this book. That said, one major ruling coalition, the Alliance, dominated politics in the 1960s and its successor, the Barisan Nasional, from the 1970s till today. This two-stage movement of UMNO-crafted politics created a path dependence of electoral success that has been difficult to displace. On the other side of the ledger, oppositional coalitions since the 1950s have evinced poor sustenance owing to failures in crafting coalition strategies, particularly with the view to establishing an effective form of mediated communalism for electoral success. Importantly, in the 1960s the leftist coalition of the Socialist Front mounted a veritable challenge and then self-destructed, not without considerable help from repressive actions by the government. Minor electoral pacts followed, but it was only in the 1990s that one saw the formation of fairly well institutionalized opposition coalitions. One such attempt was the parallel formation of Angkatan Perpaduan Ummah and Gagasan Rakyat for the 1990 election, bringing together Muslim and non-Muslim political parties into one electoral pact. A much more formalized coalition in the form of Barisan Alternatif (BA) was cobbled together for the 1999 election and, in 2008 and 2013, the most institutionalized opposition alliance, Pakatan Rakyat (PR), was formulated and remarkably held firm until 2015. This chapter delves into the events that brought an end to Pakatan and touches on how it reconstituted itself as events were unfolding up to early 2016. While the BN was also facing considerable internal strife and intraparty conflicts, there was still no suggestion at the point of writing that it would implode.

POLITICAL DEVELOPMENTS IN 2015

Much occurred on the political stage after the May 2013 general election. As tensions and politicking within the PR reached a crescendo in the middle of June 2015, this led to its formal disbandment. However, some reformulation of the opposition alliance was immediately manifest and its state-run governments appeared intact through coalitional adjustments. I will deal with this development further below, but let me first provide a brief narrative of the seven by-elections that took place after the 13th general election.