In Malaysia, the Pakatan Raykat opposition coalition assembled by Muslim Brotherhood enabler Anwar Ibrahim shows more signs of coming apart at the seams. Last month, Anwar publicly alienated the Sarawak National Party (SNAP) by making false claims about a written agreement he had with SNAP leadership about the allocation of seats. Still, Anwar had hoped to nonetheless bring SNAP into his coalition by a proposed merger with the Democratic Action Party (DAP). However, that has also fallen through:
SNAP has ruled out any possibility of a merger with DAP, putting to rest weeks of speculations on the proposed (merger) plan.
“Merger is totally out of the question because it is not workable. What we are looking forward to is the cooperation between SNAP and DAP,” its vice-president Johnny Wong Sie Lee said when contacted yesterday.
With this disclosure, the second round of the so-called proposed negotiation may not see the light of day.
It is not difficult to guess that the prospect of joining a coalition with Anwar Ibrahim at the helm may have given SNAP pause, especially after the widely publicized blowup in which Anwar called them liars last month. Of course, this prospect raises yet another problem which Pakatan now faces: no one really knows who will be in charge if Pakatan unseats the UMNO-led coalition in the upcoming elections. Pakatan has failed to announce a shadow cabinet or even propose a Prime Minister:
The MCA has challenged Pakatan Rakyat to explain why it is still unable to announce its shadow Cabinet three years after the general election, saying it was clear that the opposition parties could not agree on fundamental issues.
Party deputy president Datuk Seri Liow Tiong Lai said PKR, PAS and DAP did not have consensus in many areas, particularly on basic policies on the running of the country.
Indeed, it is hard to imagine what a hard-line Islamist party (PAS), a party of Chinese émigrés (DAP) and a leftist Islamic party (PKR) might possibly have in common in terms of an actual governing agenda. The most likely answer, of course, is that the various parties of the Pakatan Raykat coalition have absolutely nothing in common other than the fact that they want a bigger slice of the pie when it comes to control of the government, and are tired of being shut out by BN.
This, of course, is not the basis for a governing coalition. In the unlikely event that Pakatan wins, these sorts of questions will have to be addressed: to what extent will they cave to the hard-line demands of PAS’s constituency? How will the Chinese power base of DAP respond to these attempts? Where does PKR fit into the equation?
Ultimately, of course, these sort of rifts crop up out of a failure of vision. Anwar Ibrahim, who cobbled this coalition together, has never concocted or articulated a vision of what Pakatan actually stands for, other than not being BN. As a result, Pakatan has never been forced to confront what sorts of people or policies will help them reach their goals – since they don’t know what those goals are.
Thus, the only thing he has to trade on is access to power in the event of a Pakatan victory – which can lead to some undesirable results whenever one of the factions you are courting (like SNAP) feels that their piece of the pie is insultingly small.
These are not insurmountable problems for a leader of skill and vision. It is increasingly clear that Anwar Ibrahim is a man possessed of neither.
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