In the bad ol' days, it was a standing joke that for all his omniscience, even God didn't know when the Malaysian Parliament would be dissolved. That was solely Mahathir's big secret.

The (former) prime minister had long treated the dissolution of Parliament as his personal franchise: the date would be announced when He personally deemed it time that we know. Dismissive of the opposition, He toyed with the voting public like a smug and superior cat with its prey, tossing a few hints here and a few red herrings there - all of which the Cronesian media dutifully lapped up and regurgitated as front page, albeit speculative, news.

If going to the polls every five years is the single major signifier of democracy, can we infer that the Old Man's cavalier attitude towards announcing that date mirrored his contempt for the entire electoral process? After all, the result would have been all too predictable. What other outcome could there be other than the BN retaining its two-thirds majority, and business as usual?

In this matter at least, the sitting prime minister Abdullah Badawi has not followed in the tradition of his predecessor. He spared us the cat-and-mouse guessing game and made the announcement with a gravity befitting his office.

Circus and the media clowns

Blame it on Mahathir's legacy that the run-up to our general election recalls a media circus. The overblown profiles on the BN candidates to be fielded is a carry-over feature; but at least it's something to fill the newspaper pages in the absence of 'real' reporting.

While the sycophantic coverage of BN at the hustings is hardly a sea change from the formulaic 'Yes, Yang Berhormat' style of reporting in the controlled print and broadcast (private and public both) media, it's tsunami proportions could wash over and leave you feeling extremely nauseaus. Pictures of the BN incumbents and hopefuls (will you catch a glimpse of them again on the ground until 2009?) gladhandling the hoi polloi and kissing babies are not the stuff to help your nasi lemak go down better at breakfast.

And let's not forget the flashing of the blue BN dacing (weighing scale) logo that they do at every opportunity for the purpose of subliminal branding.

Coverage of the opposition, on the other hand, is inevitably how the Alternative Front's Faustian pact is in disarray and crumbling like kuih kapit. Akin to a group of primary school pupils, the opposition 'frogs' who have seen the light and hopped over to the side of righteousness are lined up as if in a class photo.

During the last election campaign, the Cronesian media had scraped the bottom of the barrel in running the series of reprehensible anti-Reformasi ads - which implied that anarchy would ensue should voters drift to the opposition camp.

If a free media is reflective of a fair election, what does the conduct of media in Cronesia say about our democracy, I wonder?

BN's loaded dice

In the zero-sum game between Umno and PAS, there could well be a shift in the number of Parliament and state assembly seats divvied between these two main players this time around. What will remain as ossified as ever are the abuses fossilised into the structure of our flawed electoral system by almost six decades of unchallenged rule.

Through gerrymandering, the electoral boundaries have been delienated to favour BN strongholds, and this weightage will stay for elections to come.

Our first-past-the-post procedure, unlike Western Europe's proportional representation, gives rise to a winner-takes-all situation. Where the representative wins by a whisker and a wafer of postal votes, the half who cast their ballot the other way are effectively disenfranchised through the adversarial "my supporters rewarded, your supporters sidelined" approach. On the federal level, can we discount the possibility of a higher power stepping in to punish the ungrateful states casting their lot with the opposition?

The alleged abuse of money, media, machinery and manpower by the caretaker government these are complaints that read like an old grocery shopping list. Don't you believe they were household staples in the election campaigns we've witnessed?

The above and other factors, like coercian and intimidation, tilt the playing field to the advantage of parties in the position to exploit them. The ruling party fired the first salvo a few days ago when it invoked the Election Offences Act to put the fear of 'divine' punishment in would-be offenders. Will anyone be surprised that the enforcement of the Act should prove to be suspiciously selective?

If the electoral process is patently flawed, can the democratic system it engenders be anything but similarly flawed? Where does our brand of democracy stand, in terms of substantive participation, and in meeting universal standards?

Politics of fear

Some of you may recall enquiring of friends as to who they will vote for, and receiving an answer that their vote is secret.

Why should exercising the fundamental right of a member of modern society be shrouded in such secrecy? The likely answer is that if these people divulged their support for the opposition, it could jeapordise their career or business. Why do you think the Akujanji pledge for civil servants is in place?

Take the example of students who wear their PAS colours openly. One mis-step and they could see their scholarships terminated. As for the students who take part in any show of politics (other than that of BN's /note the activities of Umno Clubs in the UK, US and other locales abroad), there is the Universities and University Colleges Act, with suspension or expulsion on the cards.

Would you think twice before attending an illegal gathering (it contravenes the Police Act for more than four persons to assemble, and getting a police permit for an opposition rally, in the past they say, was like striking 4-ekor) if it meant that you could end up taking a chemical bath - from the water cannons - in public?

I know that little ol' me has no wish to be wrestled to the ground by burly police officers and trundled into 'protective' custody, where it's not a nice cuppa tea that I'll be served.

Blind spots in democracy

There are the model democracies at the top of the scale like those in the Scandinavian countries, Switzerland or the Netherlands. Then there are the countries that profess some form of nominal democracy, like Zimbabwe. Not all democracies have been created equal. Those in Cloud-Cuckoo-Land delude themselves that it is democracy they have got when it never was quite the real McCoy. (1)

To give an illustration of how democracy can be subverted, let me present the instance of the last free election to be held in the Weimar Republic, as the German state was known in the inter-war years.

In Germany's mid-November 1932 general elections, the NSDAP (National Socialist German Workers' Party or better known as the Nazi Party) came into power by garnering 33.1 percent of the votes (2). Aided by horse-trading and high politics backroom manoeuvring, that one-third public support proved enough to lever the party into power, and Herr Hitler into the Reich Chancellor's seat on Jan 30, 1933.

From that epochal moment up till April 30, 1945 when Adolf famously shot himself in the head, carnage was brought to bear upon European civilisation (not to mention its own German minorities and marginalised communities - the Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, prostitutes, the mentally-ill) by a leadership that was 'democratically' elected but which had subsequently dispensed with any form of internal checks and balances.

At this juncture, let me categorically state that I'm in no way likening the political landscape in this country to that of the Third Reich. The last thing I want is for the Special Branch to launch a manhunt for my puny self or have a horde of policemen descend upon the malaysiakini office to cart away their computers in a repeat performance. I'm merely offering the Nazis as an extreme historical example of how a seeming democracy could go calamitously wrong.

Support Pak Lah?

Since nobody realistically expects the BN to be unseated, let's not see this polls as a referendum on Abdullah Ahmad Badawi.

Admittedly he has made tentative moves to clean the Augean stables of their endemic corruption. Nonetheless, it is instructive to note what Singapore's first statesman Lee Kuan Yew said in his memoir of another 'clean' Malaysian prime minister - the late Hussein Onn.

Wrote Lee "Sitting at the top of an Umno machine that was based on money politics, Hussein was completely honest. He tried to clean up corruption authorised the prosecution in November 1975 against the menteri besar of Selangor, Datuk Harun Idris But Hussein could not widen his purge in the face of resistance from other Umno state leaders."

Perhaps the more affable Pak Lah, as the head of BN, will be able to win over more symphatisers than if the abrasive Mahathir were still to lead the coalition. Nonetheless, it has been pointed out that Pak Lah had reappointed the Mahathir cabinet in toto, and picked Najib Razak - reputed to be the retired PM's choice - as his No.2. What, if anything, has changed?

Can one do-gooder undo the rot that has set in over the last 22 years?

Given the overwhelming odds that are stacked against change, the average Joe cannot be faulted if he appears to be enshrouded in a sense of fatalism. Is it not merely a Hobson's choice between the devil we know and the deep blue sea, he may think. And anyway, can his vote make even a dint of impact against the implacable brick wall of BN hegemony?

My one vote

Personally, if there should be any catalyst to move me to the polling station, that impetus comes from reading the specious letter by Jamil Spatafore Abdullah ('Islamisation: This is, after all, a democracy').

Jamil's take on democracy in his adopted land - the majority through their elected representatives 'get to make all of the rules' so you minorities had better learn to live with it - served as a timely wake-up call that I'd better pitch my support behind an alternative candidate.

There is an urgent need for a check and balance in Parliament against that majority who can, and will, rubber stamp all the rules they make against our interests. And after those rules are gazetted into law, what else we can we do about it?

We, each and every one of us, can play a part in denying the present majority their carte blanche 'to make all the rules' impervious to any form of protest. The time for action is now.

Footnote:

1) Cloud-Cuckoo-Land, or Wolkenkuckucksheim in its original German, was coined by Field Marshall Erwin Rommel, the Desert Fox. Rommel was a brilliant tactician who commanded the Wehrmacht's Army Group B and was instrumental in Germany's military successes in North Africa. He used Cloud-Cuckoo-Land (figment of the imagination) to describe Hitler's farce.

2) Hitler drew a measure of his support from the anger the German people felt at the harsh Treaty of Versailles to which Germany was subjected after losing WWI. The treaty was tantamount to 'economic rape' in calling for Germany to pay huge reparations. In rapid succession, over a period of five years, Germany was disarmed and forced to give up all its colonies and one-eighth of its land. It also witnessed the collapse of its royal house (which had ruled Prussia for 507 years) as well as hyperinflation which saw the price of an egg increase from 25 pfennings (one-fourth of a mark) in 1918 to 80 billion marks in 1923. (Source: 'Retreat to the Reich: The German Defeat in France, 1944' by Samuel W. Mitcham, Jr)

Z SUNDAY is a Joe Public who reads local mainstream print media for their unfunny and unintentional imitation of black and gallows humour. The truth may be out there but he doesn't expect to extract it from the Malaysia Boleh chaff in local newspapers.