COMMENT | The Madani government emerged from the 15th general election as a political necessity rather than a coherent ideological project. It stitched together long-standing adversaries under the language of stability, reform, and national reconciliation after a hung Parliament left no single bloc with a clear mandate.

While this arrangement succeeded in averting political paralysis, it also produced a coalition built on compromise rather than conviction. Nearly two years on, those compromises have hardened into structural fault lines.

Among all its component parties, DAP has become the most visibly weakened: politically constrained, strategically isolated, and repeatedly targeted, particularly by Umno, with little meaningful defence from its own Pakatan Harapan partners, PKR and Amanah.

This weakening is not accidental nor episodic. It is the cumulative outcome of sustained political pressure, much of it publicly orchestrated, revolving around Malaysia’s most sensitive fault lines: race, religion, language, education, and identity.

In a functional coalition, such issues are debated internally, managed discreetly, and resolved through negotiated compromise.

Under Madani, however, these matters are...