The past 3½ years have been a roller-coaster ride for Malaysians as they went from the euphoria of an expected "New Malaysia" after the 2018 general election to disgust as the nation descended into petty politicking amid a raging pandemic, and near despair as we ran through three prime ministers in quick succession.
Our contemporary politics have much in common with early 1990s Japan when, under the weight of corruption scandals and an outsized bureaucratic state, the long-ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) lost the 1993 general elections.
But, the unwieldy new coalition that took power lasted barely a year before it was replaced.
The LDP returned to power after the 1996 polls and Japanese voters never gave non-LDP parties a second chance to lead the country again.
It would be a mistake to suggest the LDP — known for its factionalism — has learnt its lesson and reformed itself. Is our politics headed the same way?
If Umno and the Barisan Nasional (BN) coalition it leads are to revert to the status quo ante as the "natural" government of Malaysia, what will this portend?
Pessimists may say it will be back to the bad old ways and days. That will be too pessimistic, but political pessimists never had been and probably never will be anything but.
I want to make the case that it was precisely the pessimists' jaundiced views of Umno and the BN that precipitated our sliding down the path towards the 2018 political denouement.
Datuk Seri Najib Razak had assumed power as prime minister in 2009 in the wake of his predecessor, Tun Abdullah Ahmad Badawi, losing BN's accustomed two-thirds majority in the 2008 polls.
Najib seemed determined to claw back BN's losses with an economic transformation drive, spearheaded by non-politician and technocrat Datuk Seri Idris Jala.
As Tan Sri Nazir Razak, Najib's brother, noted in his memoirs: "Najib hit the ground running, offering wholesale transformation of the way the government and economy worked."
Perhaps the reforms that had been put in place were not well articulated and publicised. Or, perhaps the usual pessimists, stung by Abdullah's broken promises of reforms, were unconvinced that BN could do self-renewal.
The path chosen, on hindsight, was fraught with risks. Our bifurcated polity was its undoing. In tackling economic reforms first, Najib was clearly pitching for Chinese votes when it came time to get his own mandate.
Had he regained the two-thirds majority that Abdullah lost, he would be in a strong position to undertake political reforms. It was of course not to be. The result was that when Najib led the BN into the 2013 general election, it only managed a slim majority.
There was a "Chinese tsunami" but one in favour of the opposition Pakatan Rakyat. Nazir again succinctly pinpointed his brother's dilemma:
"He sat at the top of a political party stuck in its ways, consuming vast amounts of cash to fund its system of patronage."
Ironically, as a friend in the professional sector with an inside view of how public projects procurement and management had been streamlined and tightened under Najib's watch observed, the usual avenues for political operatives to enrich themselves were slowly but surely closing.
So, Umno's fall did finally come to pass, in 2018 and — irony of ironies — under the hand of its longest-serving leader, Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad. The nightmarish outcome had been an almost exact reprise of the unwieldy and overly idealistic ruling coalition of post-1993 Japan.
Umno, like Japan's LDP, may have occasionally been waylaid by scandals and worse. But, they did not retain governmental power over decades through sheer inertia alone.
They have, within themselves, the capacity and surely the will to keep reinventing themselves to suit changing times.
That may be the saving grace of modern-day Japan and, dare we hope, of Malaysia, too.
The writer views developments in the nation, region and wider world from his vantage point in Kuching, Sarawak
The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect those of the New Straits Times