THE recent implosion of Umno suggests that its days as a formidable opposition in Malaysian politics may be numbered. As it stands, Bersatu is poised to be the greatest beneficiary of the exodus of parliamentarians and state assemblymen.

Putting the ethics of party-hopping aside, I understand there are some who supported such moves given that the (perceived) shortage of Malay-Muslim representation has been a bugbear of the Pakatan Harapan (PH) government. 

After all, given the relative success of the recent anti-ICERD rally, any doubt about the presence of such insecurities was quashed.

No matter the level of deliberate fear-mongering, the size of the crowd and the radicalisation of racialised discourse surrounding the rally speaks for itself.

When coupled with the constantly raised spectre of the May 13 riots, the offer to shore up Malay-Muslim representation in the PH government looks attractive indeed.

But party-hopping is really about the insecurities of Umno rather than that of the Malay-Muslim populace. In fact, the large-scale rejection of Umno at the ballot box may signal that ideology, race, and party are no longer closely intertwined.

The defeat of hitherto invincible Umno may have completed the separation. Treating both as the same thing is an analytical error as we shall see.

To be fair, such conflation is not surprising given that Malaysia is a classic example of the consociational model, in which political stability is dependent on communal elite representation within a grand-coalition government.

To put it simply, political stability hinges on a formulaic numbers game with different elite playing the role of careful mediators of socio-political interests between different communal groupings mainly demarcated by race and religion.

But that is, I would say, a pre-internet-age understanding of Malaysian politics. It is based on two assumptions.

First, political parties enjoy relatively strong claims of legitimacy to negotiate on behalf of their (communal) constituencies.

Second, new forms of mobilisation are ineffective due to their limited and ephemeral nature, if not as a result of violent suppression or co-optation by the state, the latter two emblematised by the fate of Darul Arqam and Anwar Ibrahim’s eventual admission into Umno.

Such assumptions have begun to look tenuous. The almost wholesale abandonment by the Chinese voters of MCA since 2008 shows that the threat of communal non-representation within the grand coalition is no longer seen as a recipe for socio-political destabilisation.

On the contrary, it created a sustained opposition that eventually ousted the long-ruling grand coalition at the federal level.

I would argue the expiration of the consociational model occurred in tandem with the gradual expiration of age-old political parties as mediators of social interests.

The rapid expansion of digital spaces through blogs and social media has negated the need for such mediation. Instead of political parties claiming to speak for the people, through hashtags, emails and petitions, the “people” now speak to the political parties instead.

Owing to the sudden release of democracy space both on- and offline, and the expansion of an urban, professional middle class that is wealthy, literate, free, and techno-savvy enough to capitalise on the proliferation of such spaces, issue- and identity-based pressure groups flourished.

Their strength lies in the fact that they are perceived to be uncompromised by the vagaries of electoral politics, nor do they require the labour and discipline demanded by party membership.

Such is the irony in that while social media fosters an empowering sense of direct participation in politics (even if such participation are often limited at the level of keyboards and touch screens), political parties became disempowered as institutions of effective and legitimate representation.

People needed political parties to be their face by default of being in an electoral democracy but politicians are the faces they trusted the least.

The peculiar combination of political cynicism and political hypersensitisation results in political allegiance shifting from political parties to issue positions that blend identity with cultural stances.

To be sure, contentious politics that revolves around custom, education, religion and language is a longstanding feature of Malaysian politics. It is just that political parties can no longer control the narrative and force disparate positions to come and meet in the middle.

Instead, political parties now rallied around entrenched positions that can be broadly (even if inaccurately) spelt out in a religio-cultural conservative-liberal divide to retain their relevance. Inter-party wars took the guise of a culture war, the genesis of which is too complicated to detail here.

None of this is unique to Malaysia, of course. The consociational model has similarly frayed in Lebanon, while the culture war erupts in the United States in even greater ferocity with political insurgents rising from both sides of the political divide (see Trump and Sanders).

The Conservative Party of UK, one of the oldest and most established political party in the world, faces severe atrophy in membership even as it maintains its relevance as the ruling party.

Yet, if this is the precarious context in which the largest the party-hopping exercise in Malaysia is to occur, I fear that what comes after may be political radicalisation instead of stabilisation.

If democracy is reduced to “elite-based politicking”, as Nurul Izzah Anwar puts it, political parties will lose credence to parties and interest groups which have no impetus to be inclusive. By then, social media’s propensity to amplify misinformation, chaos and violence will outshine its touted ability to connect.

The defence of our constitution requires that we defend the faith in our institutions, including political parties as legitimate vehicles for political representation.

Fuelling distrust in political parties means we are fuelling distrust in our constitution, the only legitimate social contract we have ever had. Without viable alternatives in mind, we do so at our own peril. – December 23, 2018.

* A Forensic Science-Asian Studies hybrid, Nicholas Chan is interested in how authority is shaped, exercised, and more importantly, resisted in Southeast Asia.

* This is the opinion of the writer or publication and does not necessarily represent the views of The Malaysian Insight. Article may be edited for brevity and clarity.