By Stanley Koh
COMMENT The MCA presidential council will probably have to open its Pandora’s Box when it meets this Thursday.
Little appears to have changed in terms of Chinese support for the party after one-and-a-half years of leadership squabbling and fierce debate on the leaders’ diligence and integrity. The recent change in the leadership has done nothing to change MCA’s image in the eyes of the Chinese community.
This is all unsurprising and telling at the same time.
Nevertheless, the political reality that should be sinking in fast is that the party’s very survival is at stake.
Some party watchers interpret the leadership’s failure to deliver Chinese votes to BN in Hulu Selangor as a snapshot of the national scenario.
Indeed, the party is facing problems that go far deeper than suggested by the handy word “image”. Underlying its most serious problems is its relationship with Umno. How it handles this will undergo further tests in the coming months and might even determine its future.
The party’s top brains are likely to deal with numerous issues, beginning with the whys, whats and hows of the failure in Hulu Selangor.
Although top-ranking MCA leaders tirelessly trudged the trail during the Hulu Selangor campaign, voting support from Chinese majority areas dropped to nine to 28%. It was 37% in the 2008 general election.
Could this be a red blinking light warning the 62-year-old party that it is already stumbling on a slippery path?
Pressing issue
MCA has dissected and analysed its electoral performance in 2008, and the findings show that it has scant ground for optimism.
In the 2008 debacle, the party won only 15 of the 40 parliamentary seats it contested. As for state seats, it captured only 31 of 90.
The pressing issue is that the Pakatan Rakyat coalition has broken BN’s stronghold over mixed seats.
If we take the result of the Hulu Selangor by-election as a sample for future scenarios, the uncomfortable but pertinent question is, “How many more mixed seats is MCA in danger of losing?”
What about urban seats? Will the party be able to win back support from urban voters given that Hulu Selangor is only semi-urban?
If MCA cannot deliver Chinese votes to BN in Umno seats, what will be the political consequences?
What are the structural weaknesses that the party needs to rectify to make itself more relevant to urban Chinese?
Even if MCA has all the answers, time may not be on its side. Worse, not all the money and multi-million projects that BN is capable of doling out can buy dignity and integrity and, least of all, votes.
Having bagged only 819,924 (43.3%) popular votes in MCA parliamentary seats—even less than its total membership of 1.23 million — in 2008, it should raise this devastating two-fold question: what happened and what to do?
Alarm bell
Yet, two years down the line, the same writing remains on the wall. There are large pockets of disenchanted Chinese voters who are adamant in rejecting BN.
Indeed, since 1959, MCA has been on a roller coaster track when it comes to electoral wins.
The party’s 2008 failure was not the only glaring defeat it has experienced in its electoral history. In 1969, its parliamentary win, at 39.4%, was almost as bad.
But looking at past statistics alone will not help us accurately predict the party’s future performance because the political landscape, while it has already changed drastically, continues to evolve.
Non-statistical contributing factors are more crucial in determining the voter swing in the parliamentary seats in which it fared badly in 2008.
MCA took a serious beating in parliamentary seats in Selangor (voter swing of -26%), Kedah (-23.3%), FT (-17.3%), Negeri Sembilan (-17.4%), Malacca (-10.7%) and Johor (-17.0%). It should be noted that Selangor, where the vote swing was sharpest, has a large Chinese voter population. The voter swing against MCA state seats, however, was worst in Penang (-26.1%).
Despite all of these, the party leadership has not accomplished much since 2008. One should therefore ought not to be too surprised about what happened in Hulu Selangor.
Nevertheless, the alarm bell must now be rung.
Besides the two-year MCA leadership crisis, the Chinese are also frustrated over issues beyond the control or making of the MCA leadership. These would include the Perak coup, the Teoh Beng Hock case, chauvinist remarks by Perkasa and Umno leaders, crime rates, rising prices, religious issues and bullying tactics against the parliamentary opposition.
Were these the underlying reasons for the Chinese refusal to support BN candidate P. Kamalanathan in Hulu Selangor? Or was it more of a show of protest against Umno?
Dirtiest tactics
Despite the presence of the Prime Minister in Chinese majority areas in Hulu Selangor, and the RM3 million thrown in for a Chinese school, MCA still failed to pull in the votes for the BN candidate.
BN employed its dirtiest tactics ever in Hulu Selangor and showed that money is the mother’s milk of politics.
In Hulu Selangor, the Chinese proved that money-electioneering politics could not faze them. This was despite the finding from a 2006 Merdeka Centre survey that most Chinese were greedy.
Did the Chinese feel that their dignity was insulted? Perhaps, they resented being treated like a small kid who can be bribed with an ice cream to shut up whenever he is noisy or complaining.
In the past, the Chinese community voted against the BN for different reasons.
Perhaps, after decades of being bullied and made a whipping boy by Umno warlords, the community has politically matured and become more conscious of civil liberties, their minority rights and the values of justice and social equilibrium.
The Chinese have often voted against MCA candidates because of the failure of the party’s leadership to protect their political interests and rights. A more important factor, however, is the MCA’s being on the side of a mediocre government perceived to be excessive in power abuses, mismanagement and bad governance and outstandingly vicious.
1Malaysia, like past lofty slogans, sweet talk and charming but rhetorical manifestoes, does not attract the Chinese. It is not credible to a community already disappointed with Pak Lah’s tenure, with its illusionary definition of what is equal and fair.
Malaysian history shows that Chinese political consciousness has been taking repetitive beatings and the majority of older Chinese voters are hardcore supporters of the opposition.
This trend has been gathering momentum since the 1964 general election.
Chinese voters, like those of other non-Malay communities, have been becoming more restive. Over the decades they have been showing more and more willingness to fight alongside civic-minded NGOs or to vote against BN in the interest of a colour-blind nation.
Ever the whipping boy whenever Umno or one of its satellite organisations needs to shore up Malay support or to divert attention from internal problems, the Chinese community has often been threatened and insulted as MCA stood silently watching.
In debt forever?
The older generation has been witnessing this living history and quietly passing over the record to the younger generation.
The Chinese, especially the young, wonder why their community deserves to be the target of these attacks despite its being only one of the 214 ethnic groups in the country.
Will the MCA leadership be able to muster the courage to defend non-Malay interests and toss its political-eunuch image into the proverbial dustbin of history?
This is not the first time nor will it be the last that MCA been placed at a crossroads. But now is the moment to do some serious soul-searching.
It is logical to assume that the emergence of a mellow, more moderate, more reasonable and magnanimous Umno under Najib Abdul Razak would make it easier for MCA to pull back Chinese support.
But what if the opposite scenario takes place, and we find a stronger Malay bias in all facts of Malaysian life and a tightening of Malay dominance?
Will MCA be forever indebted to its political master?
The choice is not easy. It is catch-22. After all, Umno was politically MCA’s greatest asset, but is proving to be an enormous liability.
