IT’S election season across much of Southeast Asia. Thailand had its election the previous month and a conclusive winner has yet to be proclaimed. Indonesia has just concluded its own and although a quick count pointed to incumbent president Joko ‘Jokowi’ Widodo winning re-election, the complete results will have to wait till May.
The attention now is focused on the Philippines which, based on its American-styled political system, is holding mid-term elections in mid-May for half its Senate, all of its House of Representatives and the entire slew of local officials (except for the recently inaugurated Bangsa-moro Autonomous Region of Muslim Mindanao which will enjoy a three-year transitional breather).
The Philippine vote looks to be a lopsided endorsement of President Rodrigo Duterte who, despite controversial policies and pronouncements which have riled much of the Manila-centred smart set, is likely to see the slate of candidates he endorses — particularly for the Philippine Senate, seen as the last redoubt of opposition to his rule — winning.
A convincing mid-term victory can only embolden Duterte to push ahead with his agenda for the remaining three years of his presidency.
The common thread running through the spate of elections is populism and how best to contain or at least manage its sway.
In Thailand’s case, its military has spent more than a decade battling the Shinawatra family: first deposing the brother Thaksin as prime minister in 2006, then his successor and sister Yingluck in 2014, only to see the party backed by the family re-emerging as the major political force it has been in the recent election. This despite the military-backed political party stealing some of the Shinawatras’ trademark economically populist clothes.
In Indonesia’s case, populism rears its head in presidential challenger Prabowo Subianto’s seeking to curry favour with with a potentially combustible mix of religious pandering and economic nationalism that saw Jokowi having to acknowledge populism’s potency by recruiting a Muslim cleric as his vice-presidential running mate.
Duterte’s populism appears to be altogether of a different, if simplified, scale to that in Thailand or Indonesia. It centres on a quixotic, near-obsessive and deadly campaign to rid the country of its drug menace. He is seeking to replicate his vaunted success in wiping the scourge from Davao City, where he was a long-serving mayor, nationwide.
The Philippine president’s take-no-prisoner approach has, if anything, only grown more popular with voters over time. It probably helped that the usual suspects — the rich (and liberal) elite represented by mostly self-serving politicians, the mainstream media and the Roman Catholic clergy — lead the opposition, allowing Duterte to launch merciless tirades against the three groups and their supposed failings and/or hypocrisy.
The saving grace for Duterte and the country he leads may be that the likely hopeless war on drugs aside, he possesses a practical bent on most other things of importance — from leaving the managing of the economy to competent professionals and trying to find a middle path in the most consequential geopolitical contest between China and the United States today.
In all these cases of the supposed rampaging destruction that populism can wreak in its wake, perhaps the relatively positive example Malaysia holds out is too often overlooked. Our challenging ethnic make-up upon independence probably meant we had little choice but to make a virtue out of the unavoidable necessity of identity politics.
We carved ourselves out as something of a moderate (and relatively rare) economic success among developing nations in spite of six decades of such unchanging politics.
Liberals and others who stood in the way of such politics learned to bend with the relentless headwinds, if relatively unbowed.
We may be trying out a new way of doing politics now and there may well be a greater chance it is falling on more receptive and fertile grounds than it is currently with those three of our major neighbours.
Each nation’s political trajectory necessarily traverses its own path, shaped by its own distinctive history and composition. Each needs to find its own path forward and not be stuck in endless political bickering and navel-gazing.
But political developments in advanced democracies today may be telling us that populism may not be just a way-station on any nation’s path to political maturity. It may well be an ever-present, if sometimes latent, condition that has to be recognised for what it is, managed astutely and bespoke policies and measures tried and tested.
It helps, naturally, if relatively incorruptible leaders lead the way for their nations to the promised land.
The writer views developments in the nation, the region and the wider world from his vantage point in Kuching, Sarawak.