More than five years after the upheavals of 2018, it is slowly dawning to the consciousness of the Malaysian electorate that “semuanya tak boleh diharap.” There is a level of disillusionment amongst Malaysians at the politics of the day, that is certainly unexpected when we think back to those hopeful days after the electoral defeat of the Barisan Nasional.
There was an expectation, then, on both sides of the aisle, after six decades of unbroken Alliance / Barisan Nasional dominance, that the electoral revolution that brought Mahathir Mohamad back to the premiership would also presage a new era of democratisation for Malaysia. The past few years have put paid to such hopes.
A significant part of this mismatch in expectations, I believe, comes from a built-in sense of undue deference to political leaders that probably arises naturally within a polity still engrossed in feudal concepts of leadership and fealty. As a society, we are naturally predisposed to think of our leaders as “good”, and that all we need to do is elect the right leaders, and these “good” leaders will naturally do what is correct and necessary.
This tendency manifests itself most clearly in that Malaysian habit of “blame the penasihat” for when things are going tangibly wrong. The initial instinct for many Malaysians is to believe that the leader must be infallibly correct and good – and so when circumstances clearly indicate some weakness or failure in leadership, the immediate response is to say “oh, this must be because the PM is getting bad advice from so-and-so.” Others would say “ah the PM needs to sack his incompetent advisors. Once he gets better advice, things would surely get better.”
This sentiment arises naturally due to the nature of power-distance dynamics in Malaysia – and is entirely unhealthy. The unfortunate truth is that sometimes bad leaders make it all the way to the top, and by the time they get there, others are too timid or too afraid to say no to the boss. In the most extreme cases of such feudal cowedness, millions lose their lives because they aren’t enough people in the system with the courage or strength to say no to a Pol Pot or a Mao.
Maybe it is simply the nature of an immature polity, that we continue to hold out for that “good man” in political leadership. Maybe it will take several more instances of living through tyranny before our society finally comes to its senses and realises that only through democratic restraints on our leaders can we compel them to put the public interest ahead of their own personal agenda.