ONE of the potential reforms that has been touted by Deputy Speaker Azalina Othman Said to solve the current political impasse and ‘stabilise’ the country is the introduction of a fixed-term parliament act (FTPA).

As a plea for political stability and good governance, Azalina has argued recently that the government of the day should consider concrete reforms such as legislating FTPA, like the United Kingdom, to preserve the honour of Malaysia’s Parliament.

In times when the executive has been baring its fangs in Parliament merely to sustain power, the fine act that the deputy speaker has performed, where she has attempted to defend the integrity of Parliament since her appointment, is deserving of praise.

Equally, she also must be applauded for willing to engage and treat the opposition impartially and injecting much needed policies and reform suggestions to improve our Parliament that is clearly in short supply in national politics.

However, of all the reforms that she has proposed, I believe that the FTPA that she has mooted through her writings for several times deserves a minor intervention.

It is in my opinion that the FTPA is a poor piece of legislation, and it would not address the issues that the deputy speaker seeks to resolve.

For starters, the purpose of the FTPA is self-explanatory that this piece of legislation was enforced to ‘fix the parliament term’.

Prior to the introduction of FTPA and similar to Malaysia, though elections were required by law to be held every five years, the prime minister could always advise the monarch to seek an early dissolution of Parliament and therefore pave the way for an early election.

However, under the FTPA, a snap election can only take place in two ways: if two-thirds of MPs in the Parliament agreed to a snap election or if the government loses a vote of no confidence and no single MP can obtain the confidence of the house within a fortnight.

On paper, the FTPA does seem to significantly reduce the power of the prime minister to ambush opposition by holding a snap election and empowering Parliament to decide when an election should be held.

By transferring the prerogative of dissolution of Parliament from the prime minister to Parliament, supporters of the FTPA would argue it would ensure some semblance of political stability in the Westminster parliamentary system.

However, though the FTPA was largely introduced as a reaction to the MP expenses scandal in the UK, I believe the act was introduced as a fail-safe mechanism to ensure the survival of the coalition government the UK voted into power in 2010.

With the FTPA in place, the coalition government formed by the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats – two political parties with opposing philosophies – was allowed to serve its full term for five years.

The conservative Prime Minister David Cameron was unable to abort the coalition with a snap election because of the binding principle of requiring two-third MPs under the FTPA.

After which, the FTPA did not stop Prime Minister Theresa May from holding a snap election in 2017 when her government was barely two years old.

This is mainly because the opposition wholeheartedly agree to the proposal of a fresh polls and duly granted the two-thirds majority that May required for a snap election.

Even though the FTPA is legislated to reduce the power of the prime minister, in the case of May in 2017, she as the prime minister remained the first mover in deciding the occurrence of a snap election, whereby her incumbent advantage of deciding when Parliament should be dissolved remains intact.

There are certainly positive aspects in the FTPA, but it will not lessen the power of the prime minister as many would believe.

This is because the opposition, in normal circumstances, is most likely to concede to any early election for the reason of trying to obtain executive power.

It was only until the peak of the Brexit crisis in 2019 when the FTPA weakness was laid bare once and for all.

Prime Minister Boris Johnson was appointed to lead the UK towards a hard Brexit, and naturally such a policy with enormous consequences would necessitate a fresh mandate to let voters decide the viability of the policy for which the prime minister was calling.

Yet, Boris Johnson failed to meet the two-thirds requirement three times to hold a fresh poll and therefore paralysing the government and aggravating the impasse.

I believe that no British person would argue against the necessity of an election at that time especially when Boris’s cabinet and Parliament itself were split on the issue.

An early poll was the only way out and the prime minister’s hand was forced by the FTPA.

Coming back to Malaysia, Azalina wanted a FTPA for the reason of political stability but as I have written previously, the current political crisis could well be solved – regardless of the existence of a FTPA – by the currently embattled prime minister returning the mandate to the people, which is currently out of the question because of the pandemic.

Additionally, from the experience of the Perak no-confidence vote, such a vote would only lead to a dissolution if there was no viable alternative government in place.

Stability could be ensured if politicians have the will to find an alternative and, if there is no solution within the parliament, it is only democratic that the mandate is returned to the electorate for them to choose their representatives again, regardless the duration of Parliament.

Furthermore, as I have shown above, there is also no concrete proof that the prime minister’s influence in deciding the date of an election would be circumscribed through the FTPA.

Judging from the experience the UK had with the FTPA, I am wary that the FTPA has the unintended consequences of creating more political instability.

While the FTPA might seek to address the inherent influence that the prime minister has over the parliament, I highly suspect that the remedy it has provided is not suitable in the UK, never mind in Malaysia with an even less resilient political institution. – August 15, 2021.

* 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”.