COMMENT The idea of a shadow cabinet has been around for nearly as long as the opposition coalition, Pakatan Rakyat's, now seven-year existence.

This is too short a gestation period for this idea to be birthed: Pakatan's overall ideological incoherence and the factional tensions and fissures within two (PKR and PAS) of its three components prevent the coalition from attaining the critical mass that would make a shadow cabinet a logical step in its maturation.

We have only just got used to the idea that there can be an opposition coalition with enough popular support to successively deny the ruling coalition a two-thirds majority in Parliament.

We are now getting used to the experience that this coalition can fight among themselves and still hold credibly enough together to win a by-election in a seat where the state leadership of one of the component partners was hostile to the notion of supporting the candidate selected to defend the Pakatan-held ward.

More instances of dissonance at the top and cohesion on the ground have to take place before we can say that an opposition coalition is here to stay and is credibly en route to being not just pretenders to but presumptives of Putrajaya.

In other words, the idea of a credible opposition coalition has congealed in the public consciousness, but it's going to take more time before refinements such as a shadow cabinet can be forged.

An idea from decades-old tradition

Shadow cabinets are an idea that has grown out of a decades-old tradition of loyal opposition forged in Commonwealth countries with at least centuries-long experience in democratically-elected representative governments, such as Australia and New Zealand.

India's democracy, with 60-plus years of experience and of the opposition being able to form the government, does not yet have shadow cabinets.

This is because the political landscape there has yet to evolve the kind of tradition of parliamentarianism and opposition component party cohesion that would make the mechanism of shadow cabinets work.

Shadow cabinets can only flourish on democratic soil that has been tilled for several decades and after two to three switches of governing power between competing coalitions or parties.

That has not yet happened in Malaysia.

As such, the formation of a shadow cabinet would be the unwise placing of the cart of specific apportionment of portfolios among capable MPs of component parties before the horse of ideological coherence and acceptance within components that factional strife is par for the course and a wise leadership co-opts rather than bans factions.

PAS and PKR have some way to go before accepting these realities while DAP, though the predurability of Lim Kit Siang ( photo ), has outlasted all factional rivals that had the effect of banking all factional fires within the party for a long time.

But the durability of one successful competitor does not guarantee the removal of the factional bacillus from the body politic of the party forever; it just means that no potential rival will risk going against the grain of the supremo so long as he is still around.

Which is why the next stage in the DAP's ascension – to the primacy that was PKR's in the overall pecking order of Pakatan until Anwar Ibrahim's amnesia about nepotism being one of the vices Pakatan was formed to combat forfeited that status for his party – is the establishment and keeping of some preservative ground rules.

No third term for principal post holders

Chief among these is not allowing a third term for the holder of a principal position within the ambit of governance wielded by Pakatan.

This means that Lim Guan Eng has to forego a third term as Penang chief minister because term limits are a necessary aspect of good governance for the refreshment and replenishment of personnel that such limits bring into play.

Guan Eng's announcement that DAP would go ahead by forming a shadow cabinet can be seen as a ploy to lull claimants from within his party for elevation in the overall hierarchy of its governance, which includes the CM's post in Penang.

It is a gimmick he should have refrained from deploying because the move will leave the DAP vulnerable to the charge of unilateralism that it has accused PAS of being guilty of, by choosing to introduce a step (hudud in Kelantan) not provided for in the common policy framework of Pakatan.

The move to form a shadow cabinet has been criticised by PAS president Abdul Hadi Awang as “arrogant” and as furnishing a reason for the severance of ties between PAS and DAP.

So long as the progressive faction in PAS has a chance, however feeble, of staying and impacting the Islamic party, nothing that smacks of unilateralism should be done by Pakatan's other components because that would bolster the suspicions of the conservatives that a victory for the progressives would clear the way for a DAP hegemony.

To demonstrate that Pakatan is not just marginally, nor just markedly, but radically better than Umno-BN, it has to establish and uphold term limits and reject unilateralism.

TERENCE NETTO has been a journalist for more than four decades. A sobering discovery has been that those who protest the loudest tend to replicate the faults they revile in others.