The recently concluded PKR party elections and its ongoing repercussions have attracted a lot of criticisms.
One thread of such criticisms that I find interesting is the allegation that newer party cohorts are not guided by the original ideals of the party, which I would think was progressive politics (or at least center of left in the traditional sense before the Overton window was blown and opened wide). With PKR’s rhetoric now appearing to sway to the right, I feel the criticism has some truth in it.
The criticism goes further that by stating that most of the newer members are attracted to the party because of power (and the potential wealth it brings) more than anything else, leaving reformasi as an empty slogan.
There is some empirics to back that sentiment. Since 2018 when the party first tasted federal power, its membership has grown by approximately 44% to 1.2 million people (as of March 2025). That growth has turned PKR into the second largest party in Malaysia by the total membership in a very short time. And the sequence of events seems to fit nicely into the criticism: power came first and then a surge of membership followed.
Trivia: DAP, the party with the most seats in the Dewan Rakyat, has about 0.2 million members only. Meanwhile, Umno is the largest party with about 3 million members by far (although arguably, the figure should be lower given various defections in recent years; for instance, Bersatu in 2023 claimed to have 0.7 million members and it is reasonable to suspect a large portion of that number were former Umno members). Just behind PKR is Pas with approximately 1 million members.
With a surge in membership in such as short time that PKR experienced, it is inevitable the original value would get diluted. Even a perfect cadre system would struggle to process that kind of surge.
Yet, that criticism is only one part of a whole equation. There is a greater tension at play here due to the nature of democracy.
In a democratic framework, any political party with aspiration for power must enjoy popular support. That almost always translates into more membership and this is true for either power-membership or membership-power causality. And political party should want new members either way.
In the case of PKR, if the criticism is on target, then it suggests that the party’s the application vetting process along with its imperfect cadre system, might be at fault. But there is also a dilemma here: how tight does one need the process to be?
Too tight and one might suffer what Umno suffered back in the 2000s where complaints were often made that joining required support from the existing local leadership that was hard to get (because nobody on the inside wanted to share the gravy). Too loose, then one could argue PKR is a case in point where the party’s values get diluted.
