AMID all the fanfare and euphoria surrounding Anwar Ibrahim’s appointment as Malaysia’s 10th prime minister, it is important to remember that PKR was one of the worst performers in the general election.

In fact, PKR’s dismal results were only outdone by Umno’s even more disastrous showing.

PKR failed to retain 16 seats, most of them to Perikatan Nasional.

Worse still, PKR cannot even claim to be the biggest party in Pakatan Harapan anymore, having lost the honour to DAP.

You may ask how Anwar Ibrahim could be the prime minister under such circumstances.

This is because our political system adheres to the principle of parliamentary government where a government is formed through parliament. But the will of parliament may not necessarily be the will of the people.

In this case, parliament agrees Anwar is the best candidate to lead the government and that the question of PKR’s performance is irrelevant. This is because the most important goal was to block PN from power.

Traditionally, the idea of parliamentary and democratic governments are allied concepts and our election results have always ensured that the will of parliament and people are not separated.

For example, most BN prime ministers have always had a simple majority in parliament as well as the majority support of the electorate.

Ahmad Abdullah Badawi’s 2004 government, for instance, had a supermajority in parliament but more importantly, it also enjoyed the strong support of more than 60% of the electorate. In this case the concept of parliamentary and democratic government is aligned.

However, since the 2008 election, the system has been unable to maintain the balance of the two as Malay politics become fragmented.

The reality is, in 2022, the people who wanted Anwar to be prime minister and who had gladly cast their ballot for PH only constituted around 37% of the electorate. This is what a hung parliament and coalition government tend to produce: a working administration that does not necessarily enjoy the public mandate that every democratic government craves.

Some people are questioning the role of BN as kingmaker in a hung parliament when the electorate has rejected BN in such emphatic fashion.

It is also fallacious to suggest that Anwar’s government has public support because PH and BN combined have a vote share of more than 50%.

This is because it is unclear whether PH and BN supporters would have voted the same way if they had known that PH would choose to form a government with BN led by the much-maligned Ahmad Zahid Hamidi.

In fact, by daring to attempt the impossible, PH might have even have received fewer votes and lost some of its base support.

This is perhaps the problem with a coalition government that was formed out of the necessity to achieve a majority in parliament but does not have a majority in votes.

This democracy deficit could also lead to an erosion of faith in the idea of democracy, especially when most of the first-time voters had supported the losing side.

While the concepts of parliamentary and democratic governments may never be perfectly aligned, the gap must not be allowed to widen if democracy is to continue to flourish

I am by no means calling Anwar’s government an illegitimate one. Under our system, the government is answerable to parliament, a fact that even Muhyiddin Yassin fully understood with his tireless pursuit of statutory declarations from the MPs.

Nevertheless, it is important to anticipate growing unhappiness with parliamentary democracy if people are made to feel that their votes do not count.

Most of all, the government must recognise that as the election yielded no clear winner, and that the ragtag coalition was cobbled together purely for a majority, its priority should be to meet the needs of those who did not vote for it. – December 4, 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”.