COMMENT | The trouble with Mr Charisma
COMMENT | Some call him Mr Charisma. Formerly from Umno, he’ll soon return to the old address because he’ll have no choice other than to quit. But here’s the problem, for starters: Mr Charisma has no charisma.
He has popularity. That’s if you believe a recent Merdeka Centre poll that gave him 69 percent ‘public’ approval. But to equate popularity with charisma is quite a stretch. Is Muhyiddin Yassin’s popularity attributable to his sudden and enormous explosion of charisma, even if Khairy Jamaluddin says so?
What puzzles is why a gutsy politician of Muhyiddin’s calibre, who has so much ‘charisma’ that makes him so madly popular, would nonetheless request and not demand that the [ruling] coalition that he leads unites behind him, for his detractors to stop pestering him over elections while he monotonously drones that the king had installed him as the country’s eighth PM?
Clearly Muhyiddin hasn’t a firm grip on power. His loose Perikatan Nasional (PN) coalition is too loose. His ‘government’ is too unwieldy. Too many ‘ministers’ are gaffing like galahs. Too many are making ad hoc decisions. Too many are engaged in parcelling out wild and woolly claims. Some inheritably putrid racist ones.
Seven months after forming the government, it’s evident PN is fraught with infighting. The ground shifts beneath its feet. It’s a quagmire now; quicksand before long...
COMMENT | Some call him Mr Charisma. Formerly from Umno, he’ll soon return to the old address because he’ll have no choice other than to quit. But here’s the problem, for starters: Mr Charisma has no charisma.
He has popularity. That’s if you believe a recent Merdeka Centre poll that gave him 69 percent ‘public’ approval. But to equate popularity with charisma is quite a stretch. Is Muhyiddin Yassin’s popularity attributable to his sudden and enormous explosion of charisma, even if Khairy Jamaluddin says so?
What puzzles is why a gutsy politician of Muhyiddin’s calibre, who has so much ‘charisma’ that makes him so madly popular, would nonetheless request and not demand that the [ruling] coalition that he leads unites behind him, for his detractors to stop pestering him over elections while he monotonously drones that the king had installed him as the country’s eighth PM?
Clearly Muhyiddin hasn’t a firm grip on power. His loose Perikatan Nasional (PN) coalition is too loose. His ‘government’ is too unwieldy. Too many ‘ministers’ are gaffing like galahs. Too many are making ad hoc decisions. Too many are engaged in parcelling out wild and woolly claims. Some inheritably putrid racist ones.
Seven months after forming the government, it’s evident PN is fraught with infighting. The ground shifts beneath its feet. It’s a quagmire now; quicksand before long.
But in its midst, a political orgy is being played out: an adrift Bersatu vs the Umno-PAS-Gabungan Parti Sarawak (GPS) triad. Bored Khairy (perhaps he hasn’t been getting enough media attention) proffered this nugget: only an in-bred Umno-ist is gifted with charisma and top-flight leadership. And Bersatu’s Muhyiddin is it.
Intriguingly, Khairy (above) never said the same of Dr Mahathir Mohamad, also ex-Umno, or of his father-in-law, Abdullah Ahmad Badawi, or the convict, Najib Abdul Razak. Perhaps Khairy fancies himself PM material and is cruising for a bruising encounter with others in Umno who, on the basis of their Umno lineage, also fancy themselves as PM material despite not a few facing grievous larceny charges in court.
It’s all predictably peculiar. Including many grassroots Malays who think the world of Muhyiddin. Not so much non-Malays except, of course, the usual suspects, the “invested interest”; i.e. the regime’s non-Malay business cronies.
Malays think Muhyiddin has been doing an unbelievable job of managing the Covid-19 pandemic. That’s incredible. Fact is, it is his chief medic, the apparently apolitical Dr Noor Hisham Abdullah, who has been doing a terrific job of managing the plague that has sunk the economy and people’s lives. Noor Hisham has been carrying Muhyiddin in the management of the medical crisis so far, and probably will until its end, whenever that might be.
Even Mahathir, a trained doctor, would have left it to Noor Hisham. Muhyiddin would have shown himself up for being out-of-depth. Leaving it to his chief medical officer is about the smartest thing he has done. It has saved him vital face. And that has nothing to do with charisma.
Little ever changes
Sadly, little ever changes in Malaysia. It lurches from problem to problem, crisis to crisis. The regime that Muhyiddin leads is littered with dodgy and none too bright characters who screw up almost every day.
That’s one problem but Muhyiddin needs these dodgy types, just as he needs Janus-faced Azmin Ali (above) types. His little coterie of uselessness exhibits today the governance incompetence of the last 50 years. Since the pandemic hit, none of Muhyiddin’s economic tsars has produced a running sheet to extricate the economy from its worst crisis since 1957.
As long as Muhyiddin keeps throwing Prihatin welfare money around, he’s happy to let Malays think he has saved the country from Covid-19 and a second spell of hot-air Mahathirism. He hasn’t. Muhyiddin needs to save Malaysia from himself but especially from the ultra-right, ethno-nationalist racist Umno and its PAS brethren. All are a menace to Malaysia, as was Mahathir if you ask George Soros.
In the 22 months of the Pakatan Harapan regime, Umno and PAS worked their way back to hijack the country. Now they’re shanghaiing the national political agenda. All of it deals with protecting and advancing the ‘ketuanan’ business, not the ideological cause. None of it is in the national interest or even in broader Malay interest.
You can bet your bottom ringgit the agendas they’ll set will be far worse than previous Umno regimes, for obvious reasons. And no thanks to timorous Muhyiddin. To cling to his position, he’s dependent on the Umno-PAS-GPS. There’s no escaping this. Here’s the irony, though: he’s hamstrung. It’s his fault for sleeping with his old devils.
Muhyiddin might also like Malays to think he has saved them from being mauled by money-hungry Chinese, especially the sinister, Chinese-dominated DAP with its ‘socialist’ pretences. He hasn’t. He cooked up that fairy-tale as an excuse to leave the limping, pompous Harapan, to reboot his old racist Malay-first incantation, and create a Malays-only ‘government’. Where it goes from here is hugely worrisome.
So when Muhyiddin said two or three days ago, when he reiterated his promise to uphold the so-called Shared Prosperity itinerary and that non-Malays wouldn’t be marginalised from it, did he mean this or was he playing to the gallery? Or was it his attempt at pushing back his coalitional enemies?
The answer to the first question is: we don’t know – yet. But we have plausible answers to all three questions. In its 22-month ‘stewardship’, Harapan lost five consecutive by-elections. It was out-and-out humiliating for a wobbly regime that had promised to build a New Malaysia (Malaysia Baru), only to leave it to be the old one, in real terms.
Feudalistic, patrimonial Malaysia has returned with a vengeance. Muafakat Nasional has put patronage politics at the head and tail of national politics. The same patronage politics that burned myriad holes into the machinations of party politics, governance and institutions on the basis of their spurious claims to bumiputeraism and public finance. Not to mention the relentless corruption via highly familiar state-business linkages, the hothouse of Malaysian kleptocracy. And there’s not a thing Muhyiddin can do to roll it back.
His white-noises won’t wash. They're for popular domestic consumption. He can’t do a thing because corruption and kleptomania are Umno’s cot, and only Umno’s. It’s the red zone for Muhyiddin even if he’s to be believed that he can eliminate corruption in the way Harapan said it would, and failed. That’s in spite of dragging Najib and his FLOM, and Umno’s band of Forty Thieves, to court.
State-sponsored corruption
If Covid-19 is a plague of untold contemporary proportions, Malaysians know another all too well: state-sponsored corruption – one that has for decades wolfed down a trillion or three ringgit of scarce resources, diverting them to totally corrupt Umno ends. The state, viz. Umno, protects kleptocracy with zeal, and PAS is playing ball with Umno this time for the spoils. PAS has sold its supposed religion-morality to the money deities but it comes as no surprise.
It’s not hard to fathom the (re)turn to the old politics, and why Muhyiddin is effectively weak. The Chini and the recent Slim by-elections have shown that Umno and PAS are fathering Bersatu more and more. Without them, Bersatu is a non-entity. It survives by the skin of its teeth courtesy of Muafakat, although it won’t be long before Muafakat shoves Bersatu, with GPS’s blessings.
The Chini and Slim by-elections – the latter having also rendered Mahathir’s Pejuang party stillborn despite Mahathir’s pipedreams of winning 36 seats in the 2023 polls – says real national power does not lie in the laps of Muhyiddin and Bersatu but Umno-PAS, period; even if the current Umno top brass end up spending the rest of their lives in prison for robbing blind – equally – non-Malays and Malays. It’s just weird that Malays don’t seem to get the Umno scam.
Muhyiddin is a lame duck PM. His charisma hasn’t charmed his coalition partners an iota. Umno has been sharpening its knives the day Harapan collapsed so ignominiously. Umno-PAS rule the national political roost. Bersatu is hanging on by the threads of its short shorts. Harapan will struggle to make a jot of difference in the general election, being so darned by its spectacular implosion in February.
For all his popularity among grassroots Malays, Muhyiddin will ‘relent’ to Muafakat before 2023 – unless he grows a spine now and calls a snap poll to win the popular legitimacy that eludes him. Even then there’s no telling if he’ll win the ballot and if he does what it might mean for Malaysia given the current configuration or the other leading to the next poll.
MANJIT BHATIA reads economics and international politics at New Hampshire in the US.
The views expressed here are those of the author/contributor and do not necessarily represent the views of Malaysiakini.
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