PERHAPS there should be an official poll to gauge the performance of Anwar Ibrahim and Najib Razak after their much-anticipated political debate.

The poll should ideally ask what the audience’s stand was on these issues before the debate and whether their opinions about the subject have changed after the discourse.

Except that the moderator had made it all clear before the event that the debate was not to produce a winner or a loser but to focus on making Malaysia better.

Ideally, modern political debates between politicians involve the employment of rhetoric coupled with numbers, evidence and facts to persuade policy discussions to move in your favour.

Therefore, no matter how civil Malaysia wants its political debates to be, it is also imperative to recognise that debates are also about “winning” arguments. This is, after all, the raison d’etre of any modern political debate, the solution to making Malaysia better lies in acknowledging a better policy over another.

Presidential debates in the United States or the United Kingdom’s party leaders’ debates are conducted right before election, where a ballot box determines who has won the arguments.

In this case, former prime minister Najib should feel rightfully content if more people are convinced that the government should bail out the beleaguered Sapura Energy Bhd after the debate.

Nevertheless, there is increasing evidence that the tradition of political debates inherited from ancient Greek democracy is increasingly ineffective in swaying the mind of voters.

Take the example of the 2019 UK election where Prime Minister Boris Johnson, leader of the Conservative Party, was re-elected even when he refused to take part in a political debate involving major political party leaders.

Similarly, former prime minister David Cameron had also famously ducked a televised debate right before a general election and yet still won the election with a larger majority.

Given the increasing importance of voters’ focus groups and research on voting behaviour, one would suspect political leaders with ambition to become prime minister could flagrantly ignore political debates only because they could do it with minimal political risk.

Data also shows that while the majority of British people want a debate between political leaders, there is equally a large number of people who believe their votes will not change based on the debate.

Instead of attempting to win the argument which debates should normally do, it has been reduced to a political theatre being displayed on television.

This may also apply to the political debate between Anwar and Najib: Malaysians appeared to enjoy the two political giants arguing and thrashing one another, but was there anyone watching the debates with an open mind, and have their views changed?

Divisive politics, the entry of social media, multiple news agencies and most distressingly, the prevalence of fake news may have hardened the political views of the people and render political debates ineffective.

The nature of Malaysian politics in recent years have left many fence-sitters or non-political individuals feeling hopeless and cynical towards politicians from both sides of the aisle and this naturally led to fence-sitters feeling disinclined to watch the debates with an open mind.

Even in the likelihood of these people watching the debate, what Anwar and Najib offered during the debate was rehearsed speeches and views that they had either previously spoken about or made known through social media.

Aside from raising the idea of Petronas bailing out Sapura, Najib’s stance on Sapura needing government help and political stability had already been explained numerous times by Bossku on Facebook.

The same could be applied to the opposition leader where Anwar’s emphasis on greater transparency is a political idea that is as old as the days of “reformasi”.

Truthfully, for me as an individual, the debate did not offer much beyond what these two politicians had already told the public, nor did I get to learn more about their policy position on the matters discussed.  

The lack of concrete discussion had also perhaps led to how the cake-and-cash analogy had garnered the most response and discussion, but not much about how to ensure Sapura stayed sovereign or the economic vision for Malaysia.

Also, Najib reiterating that cash is king and ensuring people getting a bigger slice of the economic cake and Anwar’s retort about which person will get the slice of the cake is nothing new in Malaysia’s political discourse. It was merely a repeat of a political trope used previously by these two politicians.

Then, what was left were individuals spanning from the political party’s rank and file and to those whom their interest is tied with either Anwar or Najib.

There is zero likelihood that these individuals who attended the debate physically would publicly change their views no matter how well the opposition performed.

The audience were mainly supplementing the political spectacle that was happening before their eyes by the occasional cheering, clapping and some booing even though the moderator had said that it would be a silent debate.

Perhaps the much-hyped political debate was never about how to deal with Sapura, but rather an extension of a long political campaign of one person’s ambition to become prime minister and another person’s justification for his successful tenure as prime minister. – May 15, 2022.

* Kenneth Cheng has always been interested in the interplay between human rights and government but more importantly he is a father of two cats, Tangyuan and Toufu. When he is not attending to his feline matters, he is most likely reading books about politics and human rights or playing video games. He is a firm believer in the dictum “power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will”.