From the excellent Mob’s Crib. Now, I cannot stay awake anymore. I am off to bed.
Categories
Tag: Pakatan Rakyat
Opposition parties are leading in all key seats in Penang. [Latest updates – 7.10pm. Malaysiakini. March 8 2008]
Die Gerakan die! Die for betraying the ideal of liberalism for power.
Hindraf leader M Manoharan, who is being held under the Internal Security Act, is reported to have taken the Selangor state seat of Kota Alam Shah (unconfirmed). [ISA candidate Manoharan wins seat – 7.20pm. Malaysiakini. March 8 2008]
This could be taken as a rejection of ISA!
Politics 101 wonders who should be the next opposition leader. Specifically (since his post is short, I might as well reproduce it wholly here):
Hypothetical question: If DAP and PAS win 18 federal seats each in the elections and PKR wins one, which party would the PKR MP back for Leader of the Opposition?
Is the DAP doing enough to ensure, come what may, it will continue to hold the Opposition Leadership Office?
Is winning 18 seats and letting Mullah Hadi Awang take over the islamist agenda as Opposition Leader a victory for secularism? [Hypothetical question. Politics 101 Malaysia. February 6 2008]
This of course asked with an assumption that these parties would fail to form the next government.
If the political scenario does reach that stage, it is presumptuous for anyone of us to conclude that candidates for the next opposition leader would be either DAP or PAS. It could be from PKR. In a situation where a small party holds the tie-breaker vote, it may actually have disproportionate influence over its larger partners.
In fact, the Nash equilibrium in that situation is to have a MP from PKR to be the next opposition leader as proven in the following diagram:
For those unfamiliar with game theory, this is how you read the diagram.
In the payoff boxes (the ones with a pair of numbers in it), the first figure is the payoff for Player 1 (DAP) while the second figure corresponds to Player 2’s (PAS) payoff. The numbers are ordinal and not cardinal.
The first box — named P1’s optimality — shows Player 1’s (DAP) best responses given Player 2’s (PAS) action. Those responses have been highlighted in yellow.
The third box — P2’s optimality — shows Player 2’s (PAS) best responses given Player 1’s (DAP) action. Those responses have been highlighted in yellow too.
The third box highlights only overlapped responses and these responses are known as Nash equilibrium. As you can see, there is only an equilibrium.
The underlying rationale behind matrices and payoff is simple: there are 3 rules.
One is that PKR refrains from voting DAP and PAS; it only votes for itself. An either-or voting for DAP or PAS by the smaller party is bound to hurt its relationship with the two large parties. In chess, it is called zugzwang; any movement is unfavorable and the best move is not to move at all but of course, skipping a turn is not an option in chess. Unlike chess however, PKR does not need to move in this political maneuver. If PKR totally refrains from voting at all, boxes with {6,5} and {5,6} will be {0,0}. Why?
That leads us to rationale number 2: the worst outcome for all players is the lack of a leader. In the matrices, payoff {0,0} illustrates a situation of no opposition leader and that happens when both parties vote for themselves with PKR abstaining for voting.
Three, PAS and DAP hate each other gut. This is observable in payoffs {10,1} and {1,10}.
If a person plays out the coordination game, actions by both DAP and PAS that overlap with each other is to choose PKR as the opposition leader.
In case PKR totally refrains from voting, there will be three Nash equilibria. Do you know which ones?
Categories
[1539] Of expected seats
I was scanning the news just now and became interested in expected result of the upcoming election.
DAP expects to grab anywhere from 30 to 40 parliamentary seats. DAP supremo Lim Kit Siang further said that PAS and PKR should be able to bring in from another 40 to 50 seats.[1]
Abdul Hadi Awang later said that PAS is targeting to win at least 40 seats.[2]
Does that mean that PKR is targeting to win merely 10 seats? That is kind of a low expectation, do you not think so? If PKR is targeting only 10 seats, I would certainly feel greatly disappointed with PKR.
I know that this kind of synthesized expectation might not be accurate but in absence of announced target from PKR, this is likely the closest expectation based on real information, assuming of course that Mr. Lim and Mr. Abdul Hadi are not feeding false information to the press.
The most disappointing thing is that DAP, PAS and PKR expect to gain a total of 90 seats at most. Do correct me if I am wrong but I think that the curent opposition has no ambition to become a government at all.
But perhaps, they are just being realistic. We all love realists, don’t we?
[1] — KUALA LUMPUR: DAP should focus on winning 30 to 40 parliamentary seats, and Parti Keadilan Rakyat and Pas another 40 to 50, said opposition leader Lim Kit Siang yesterday. [DAP aiming for 85pc success rate. New Straits Times. February 2 2008][↩]
[2] — MUAR: PAS has set a target to win at least 40 parliamentary seats and try to have representatives in every state in the coming general election, its president Datuk Seri Abdul Hadi Awang said. [PAS sets winning target. The Star. February 5 2008][↩]
If there are solid unwavering rocks above ever-changing Malaysian waters, the centrality of race and religion to local politics has to be one of them. Most of Malaysian political parties are positioned to capitalize this reality though there are those whom wish to break away from the past. While movement away from communal politics requires great effort, I am convinced that the first party to be able to cut through the racial political barrier will dominate Malaysian politics until another true multiracial entity is formed. It is for this reason that I strongly feel DAP needs PKR to survive in the long run.
PKR is the only real multiracial political party with national presence on paper and on the ground in this country. If current circumstances continue to stay true into the future, PKR will be the only party with true potential to seriously challenge the incumbent BN.
Parties that place themselves inside suffocating communal boxes are trapped in a quagmire. This is especially so for those which identify themselves with non-Malay or non-Muslim communities. From the context of communal politics, only a Malay or a Muslim-based party has a real chance to gain majority power in the Parliament. This is based on the fact that Malay as well as Muslim groups form the majority in Malaysia and is further compounded by the fact that non-Malay votes have been shrinking for the past decades.[1][2] Parties blind to skin color and religious beliefs are the only players that will climb over the communal barriers.
Communities are not monolithic but communal politics falsely assumes those communities are so. In this aspect, communal-blind position is superior to that race and religion-based stance. Yet, the latter dominates the local political scene and this illustrates a status quo bias on a grand scale.
While that is so, BN has one foot in the door and even that is enough to outmaneuver its rivals which are communal-centric like DAP, PAS and previously PBS in Sabah. I concede that there are various factors at play but the fact that DAP appeals largely to the Chinese, PAS to the Muslims and PBS to the Kadazan-Dusun contribute to these parties ineffectiveness in challenging BN at the federal level.
DAP of course recognizes itself as a multiracial party. The concept of Malaysian Malaysia still echo years after it first gained popularity during Malaysian Solidarity Convention in the 1960s. I dare say the idea has played a large role in the evolution of “Bangsa Malaysia” or at the very least, the idea of a rights egalitarian Malaysia.
Slogan however is quite different from action. DAP is heavily dependent on Chinese voters and that fact is undeniable especially given the context of DAP-PKR general election negotiations. A true multiracial party will contest in any constituency regardless of the population composition of the area and yet, DAP are mostly interested to contest in Chinese-majority constituencies. And no, token candidates do not count.
Unlike DAP, PKR is jockeying to contest in a number of areas with diverse backgrounds, including Chinese-dominated areas. Reports suggest that negotiation between the two parties is hard because of PKR’s insistence in contesting in what DAP normally considers as its turf.[3] If seen through the lens of communal politics, PKR is theoretically capable of contesting in all areas that DAP plans to contest in but the reverse is untrue. A friend deep in PKR once told me that there are more Chinese in the party than there in DAP despite the fact that DAP is seen as Chinese while PKR to some extent as Malay. If that is true, it only gives PKR more cards to play. Regardless of that, there is no doubt there is a sizable number of Chinese in PKR and that is part of the reason why PKR wants a chance to contest in Chinese-dominated areas. A successful negotiation with DAP will go a long way to break the perception that PKR is a Malay party.
The audacity of PKR in taking a tough stance against DAP may sound shocking if the whole election negotiation is seen through the result of 2004 general election. In that election, PKR was almost wiped out of existence only four years after a relatively wildly successful debut in 1999 for a new party. But in conducting valuation of a company, it is future performance that matters, not past performance, regardless what many chartists, the practitioners of pseudoscience, say. That same is true with any political party.
But of course, before PKR could realize its potential, it has to do well in the expected upcoming election. While Malaysian demographics brought disadvantages to DAP, it is a key to PKR’s future. PKR sorely needs organizational efficiency and it could access and learn the skills through DAP or PAS. If it chooses PAS, PKR will only fall into the traps of communal politics. If it chooses DAP, it stands a chance to break free from the limitations of communal politics. This is the immediate question PKR needs to answer.
For DAP, it is whether they cooperate with or reject PKR. DAP may reject PKR and prolong its relevance until demographics makes its irrelevant or it may help in creating a more credible and move inclusive alternative to BN.
A creation of a credible alternative to BN requires for DAP and PKR to embrace each other. A failure to do so will cause PKR to gravitate toward PAS and DAP to become irrelevant and that is a step back from journey toward more inclusive politics. In response to my criticism that PKR is too populist in its stature with no clear direction ahead, Nik Nazmi emphasizes on the need to adopt big tent politics.[4] While I am unconvinced how that answers my criticism, as far as communal politics is concerned, he is right but a big tent politics only works if DAP walks together with PKR hand in hand.
Truly, to break free from communal politics, future merging of DAP and PKR is the only answer, if all trains stay on its tracks. DAP and PKR do not have forever to contemplate on the merger though. Both has to do so before BN turns to the dream of Onn Jaafar which UMNO rejected long ago.
[1] — Ethnic groups: Malay 50.4%, Chinese 23.7%, indigenous 11%, Indian 7.1%, others 7.8% (2004 est.)
Religions: Muslim 60.4%, Buddhist 19.2%, Christian 9.1%, Hindu 6.3%, Confucianism, Taoism, other traditional Chinese religions 2.6%, other or unknown 1.5%, none 0.8% (2000 census) [The World Factbook: Malaysia. CIA. Accessed February 3 2008][↩]
[2] — IN his preamble, The Star’s acting group chief editor Datuk Wong Chun Wai pointed out that power sharing in this country has been a numbers game. The Chinese now comprise only 25% of the total population compared to some 35% a decade ago. Only about 30 of the 219 parliamentary seats are still predominantly Chinese. [Shrinking Chinese votes. The Star. November 25 2007][↩]
[3] — A showdown between DAP and PKR is on the cards in some constituencies as the two opposition parties could not reach a consensus on their seats allocation for the coming general election as a ‘deadline’ expires today.
[…]
The Chinese-majority seats have became a battlefield as opinion polls predicted there will be a swing of Chinese support from the ruling Barisan Nasional to the opposition due to economic and crime factors. [DAP-PKR seat talks on brink of collapse. Beh Lih Yi. Malaysiakini. January 31 2008][↩]
[4] — This might seem broad, but Keadilan is after all built as a big tent on the radical centre. From a purist’s perspective, this might seem less than ideal (pun intended); but in practice, many successful and ground breaking political movements were built on broad coalitions focused on immediate issues and core principles without being bound in ideological straightjackets. In the long run, a nationally successful political party has to represent the spectrum of the society they represent. [Keadilan and Big Tent Politics. Nik Nazmi.com. March 27 2007][↩]