COMMENT | The upcoming Malacca state polls could have been the perfect opportunity for Pakatan Harapan to discover the coalition’s state of play post-Sheraton Move and MOU with the federal government.

It would also have been the perfect opportunity to discover if and how the Malay uber alles political parties could manage a state election without imploding.

With PKR giving the impression that they are willing to work with political mercenaries who not only brought down a Harapan government but also a PN government, Harapan demonstrates yet again that the political corruption they accuse the federal government of applies to them as well.

Opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim saying that Harapan - even though there is dissension in the ranks - was giving these frogs time to formally apply to join the coalition is another nail in the coffin for Harapan. Tian Chua claiming that Harapan needs to work with anyone to ensure victory should inform us of the mindset of political operatives in Harapan who coddled the old maverick and played dumb about the events leading up to the Sheraton Move.

The news cycle should not be dominated by items highlighting the internal bickerings of Harapan. The narrative should not be of how Harapan is attempting to obstruct an election or courting political frogs or how Harapan is attempting to form another government through the backdoor.

All these news stories do is feed into the narrative that Anwar is a power-hungry incompetent hack and that the “Chinese” DAP will do anything and everything to hang on to the coattails of Malay power brokers to secure power.

It also places the DAP in a position of having state-level actors willing to work with anyone thereby causing internal strife in local party politics, which affects federal-level politics.

Thankfully, DAP leader Lim Guan Eng has stated that incumbent Pengkalan Batu state assemblyperson Norhizam Hassan Baktee would not be accepted by the DAP as a candidate in the upcoming polls, which leaves the other three frogs.

This of course is part of the problem when it comes to the DAP's messaging when it comes to the polls.

What happens when Harapan is embedded with these cretins? Oh wait, we already know what happens and how Harapan dealt with the subterfuge and infighting that led to the Sheraton Move which formed the Malay uber alles government.

Rolling the dice

The fact that ab initio these charlatans have not been rejected and Anwar claims that these people wanted “change” should tell everyone what Harapan stands for, and it does.

No doubt, state-level DAP politics would determine if these frogs will be accepted but it just means that the DAP, like PKR, would be willing to work with anyone, even those who had betrayed them, instead of rolling the dice on an election.

Of course, the rakyat will never know what is going on because political operatives are tight-lipped about such deal makings but will spill their guts when the damage has been done and they attempt to portray themselves as victims rather than active participants.

Honestly, when Norhizam says something like this - “Parties are just a platform, during the election, we do have to have a party to contest but after that, we move on our own ticket.” – any rational person would understand that despite the protestation, this man is in it for himself and anyone hooking up with him, would be thrown under the train if it was politically expedient to do so.

And of course, how on earth could PKR choose to deal with someone who says that the rakyat rejected the “Chinese party” when in fact the DAP has been consistently holding up its end of the bargain while giving into the preoccupations of its Malay partners sometimes at the expense of its base.

A frog-free front

All these warring factions do not give a damn about their constituents and the constant shifting of alliances, and the political manoeuvrings have created a terrain where conspiracy theories and hyper-partisanship shift focus away from the failed responses of this government and the brazen silliness of the rakyat disguised as rebelliousness or fatigue.

Lim said that he hoped there were no doubts on the matter that Malacca Harapan chief Adly Zahari was to be Harapan’s chief minister candidate. No doubts from who? And this is the problem right here. Lim is part of the big cheese in Harapan supposedly making all these important decisions and he is publicly wondering if there are any doubts from his own coalition? How absolutely bonkers.

Meanwhile, the minions of Putrajaya who should be rightly in the spotlight get a free pass because what Harapan should have been doing was presenting a unified, frog-free front, and concentrating on putting forward policies that would help Malacca deal with the economic vagaries brought upon by this pandemic.

There are PKR and DAP political operatives who reject any form of political cooperation with these traitors but do their voices really count, especially when we have a cabal of vipers, who still believe that retaining the government through undemocratic means is safer than actually discovering the post-pandemic new political normal?

This could have been the perfect opportunity for Harapan to rebound and put out a new narrative sans kowtowing to the old maverick. But really, this is also a kind of feel-good fairy tale because what this manure show demonstrates is that the systemic dysfunction of Harapan is poisoning reformasi in this country.