AS Malaysians commemorate Merdeka Day this weekend, it should be useful to mull over what Malaysians want.
This can be a rather tricky proposition given the cacophony of voices crowding our public spaces, particularly in cyberspace. But the loudest and most prominent voices are not necessarily representative of ordinary Malaysians, the so-called silent majority.
It should be safe to say the silent majority in every country wants basically the same things. The ability (freedom?) to carry on with ordinary daily lives will be near if not at the top of the list of what people everywhere want.
All Malaysians, it can be safely assumed, want nothing more than to live in a country at peace with itself and its neighbours, a country that is safe to live in, where a decent-paying job is readily available, and where they can have reasonable access to such basic amenities as affordable food, clean water and fresh air, uninterrupted electricity supply, cheap and efficient public transportation, affordable quality housing, education and universally-available healthcare.
These are the fundamental material needs that all Malaysians readily identify with and relate to. And in all of these, we can also reasonably assume that Malaysians are, by and large, content that their needs are rather well taken care of.
It follows, therefore, that Malaysians will express that sense of contentment by electing and re-electing more or less the same Federal Government from the very first day that we attained Merdeka.
But as the country and its citizens mature and take for granted many of the material things that other countries, which won their independence about the same time as Malaysia, still struggle to attain, it is perhaps only natural that Malaysians strive for other things, too.
Thus, the clamour for “change” that expressed itself in the last general election, pointing to a growing number of Malaysians straining at the leash, so to speak.
They are signs that less material things but more intangible benefits are increasingly being demanded.
Although some would argue that the growing popular impatience with corruption informs the demand for “change”, that desire seems to be a more generalised and “natural” progression as even squeaky clean Singapore is experiencing growing demand for greater political space and a more “responsive government”.
The Singapore experience, however, may not be helpful for our purposes. Although both nations are at roughly similar junctures in their political development, ours is, by far, the more hazardous going forward.
Singapore, after all, has already attained the status of a rich country, while we are on the cusp of a similar status although we face the danger of falling into a middle-income trap if politics get in the way of our advancing further.
This is brought into sharp relief by current political intrigues and clear signs of dysfunction in the Pakatan coalition running Selangor, our richest state.
It is just as safe to assume that Malaysians, in particular, those who most enthusiastically hankered for “change”, are growing increasingly sick and tired of the state of politics there.
If such is but the “natural” progression facing the nation, Malaysians must brace themselves and get used to the idea of politics becoming much less predictable and more dysfunctional and, therefore, messier and less effective.
The contemporary world is replete with examples of people in democratic countries growing increasingly disenchanted with their political classes, who are seemingly consumed with their political battles at the expense of the people’s interests.
It is discouraging to read in the recent issue of Foreign Policy academic discourses about America as a “Land of Decay and Dysfunction”. Is that how and where the so-called leader of the free world is leading us all?
At some point, are people in democratic societies confronted with the unpalatable choice of between preserving their hard-fought political freedoms and seeing equally hard-won economic freedoms disappear? Is “popular” and “populist” in the political lexicon mutually exclusive?
As we celebrate another Merdeka Day, this writer laments the reality that recent good economic news is increasingly being crowded out by bad political news enveloping the nation.
The good economic news should make it easier for our national leaders to sacrifice some political popularity by taking tough measures needed to place our economic wellbeing on a firmer footing.
But we have to refuse being pandered to by political populists. Malaysians have some tough decisions to make on what they really want going forward.