Campaigning for the 11th Sarawak election has gotten off to a colourful, if initially subdued, start. Even pleasantly breezy evenings in Kuching thus far have not quite stirred the crowds.
In the two weeks set aside for campaigning before the May 7 polls, voters will surely warm up to the nightly ceramah in coffee shops and open spaces across the length and breadth of Sarawak.
All this is, of course, not for lack of enthusiasm about the most vital exercise in any democracy. A grand total of 228 candidates are contesting in the election for 80 seats in the state assembly.
Two were won uncontested by the ruling Barisan Nasional (BN) on nomination day. Four or five candidates will battle it out in 20 of the seats. Popular enthusiasm has, as always, never been in short supply.
But, what exactly are voters in Sarawak being asked to decide on?
Since BN first came into being in 1974, it has always been the same: returning it to power based on its record of improving the lives and wellbeing of ordinary people. This time around, it is no different.
The only difference going into the polls this year is that, for the first time after more than three decades, a new leader is leading the charge, ushering breathtakingly sweeping changes with such gusto that even an opposition incumbent conceded on the hustings that she only wants to win re-election to ensure the “new broom” continues to sweep well and clean.
Thus, despite all the attendant sound and fury that so many candidates offer in an almost bewildering cacophony, one certainty remains even before a single vote is cast: the political status quo holds, more or less.
The opposition alliance, such as it is, no longer promises an alternative government, unlike in the last general election. Pakatan Rakyat may have morphed into Pakatan Harapan but the only “hopeful” sign for its constituent parties appears to be the rather dismal one of “to each, its own”.
BN may have its own internal squabbles among parties, but in the end, Chief Minister Tan Sri Adenan Satem mustered the requisite leadership toughness to enforce discipline, so voters are faced with an unambiguous slate of BN candidates.
No such luck went Pakatan’s way. Despite an extended lead time when every political operator in the state knew for months that an election loomed and sessions to thrash out differences on overlapping claims to certain seats held, all descended into utter disarray as voters are now confronted with the unseemly spectacle of DAP and PKR — nominally members of the opposition alliance — going head-to-head in six constituencies.
Talk from either of the two opposition “allies” to voters about ignoring the other can no longer hide the sad reality that many had long suspected: that Pakatan is nothing but a political marriage of convenience, where selfish interests trump political give-and-take so essential to the sustained success of Malaysian democracy.
The only way the opposition can ever hope to replace the BN in government is if it can somehow replicate its recent electoral success in urban areas. It appears DAP is not about to accept that Malaysia’s political map should be so neatly divided up into urban and mostly predominantly Chinese areas to DAP, and rural, predominantly Bumiputera areas to PKR. Exactly the same straitjacket the opposition accuses BN of imposing on Malaysians.
The more fundamental underlying tension plaguing the opposition is the contradiction that two ostensibly multiracial parties continues as two distinct and separate political entities.
Asked to account for such an apparent contradiction in a private conversation, a former senior Sarawak PKR leader allowed that personal egos within the leadership of both parties may be at play.
That provides small comfort for Malaysians hankering for a better future for all.
As the likely next United States president Hillary Clinton herself said in her own electoral hustings, it is not enough for politicians to just enumerate what ails a country; they need to prove they can offer real and practical political solutions.
Pakatan has not even gone beyond first base in this Clinton “test”. It has not shown it has answers to its own most fundamental problem, let alone begin to address problems in the country’s governance.
Governing Malaysia or even Sarawak is of a different order to governing Penang or Selangor. Of the former, BN has not only proven it is still in possession of the goods but that an alternative remains elusive.
John Teo is a Kuching-based journalist