COMMENT Malaysia’s two competing coalitions for political power stand at identical crossroads.

Incumbents Umno-BN is dysfunctional, having lost the moral legitimacy to govern long before it was stripped of the political writ to rule by its loss in the popular vote in the 2013 general election.

Rivals Pakatan Rakyat has ceased to exist, its expiry brought on by acute ideological derangement.

Umno-BN will continue to trudge on by dint of the momentum of its more than half-century's incumbency, a longevity that - if Malaysian voters don’t watch it - will overtake the longest in the democratic world, which dubious honor belongs to the Institutional Revolutionary Party of Mexico.

The intractability of some of Mexico’s current problems is traceable to that party’s 72-year tenancy.

Now that the DAP has departed it, a rump of Pakatan will continue to sustain the fiction that the opposition coalition can persist under the same common policy framework of seven years ago when the framework was crafted which component, PAS, has willfully chosen to mock.

But that persistence would just be a confirmation of the truth of an observation of Anwar Ibrahim’s favourite poet - that “human kind cannot stand very much reality.”

PKR will be aided and abetted in their flight from reality that Pakatan can continue to exist by the religious inebriates who have taken over PAS for whom TS Eliot’s admonition will not serve to deter them in substituting artificial constructs for descriptions of the real world.

Where will all this leave the broken Pakatan’s former chief inspiration?

Anwar Ibrahim, the chief welder of the seven-year coalition, will be left high and dry.

On June 7, PKR could have put distance between it and PAS by simply denouncing the decision of the Islamic party at its muktamar the previous week to cut ties with PAS.

Veiling itself in ambiguity

But PKR chose to veil itself in ambiguity and opted instead to play an unsolicited role as mediator between DAP and PAS. DAP was prompt in its “Thanks, but no thanks” riposte.

This afternoon, when he puts his mark on PKR’s handiwork, Anwar ought to delineate what was it that has brought Pakatan to its sorry end before deigning to describe where the rump that remains ought to go and how.

More than ever clarity is needed in this time of rampant confusion in the country and in both competing coalitions for federal power.

Just where does all this leave the DAP?

Poised to take best advantage of any new resurgence in currents let loose in the country within a fructifying fortnight in November 2007 when polls reform advocacy group, Bersih, organised a huge rally in Kuala Lumpur which was followed by an impressive march by the Hindu Rights Action Force (Hindraf).

That was the matrix for the first denial of a two-thirds majority to the Umno-BN in March 2008 and its repetition in May 2013 - this was coupled with Umno-BN’s loss in the popular vote.

The true import of the two denials and, crucially, the loss in the popular vote has yet to run its course in the political landscape.

Anwar showed great acuteness in picking up the signals emitted by the marches of November 2007 and leveraged them to two denials of Umno-BN’s supermajority and a besting of the ruling coalition in the popular vote, before the reactionary furies he unleashed in his former allies came back to gaol him.

But now the person with the most sensitive antennae is literary laureate A Samad Said ( centre in photo ).

If it is true that artists are the antennae of the race, then Samad’s decision last week to enlist with the DAP is an early pick-up of what’s trending.

Given DAP’s certainty that Pakatan is dead in the water, which is indisputable, and that the forces for change that jelled Elections 2008 and 2013 are very alive, a new configuration on the national political landscape may be spawning.

The currents that were set off in November 2007 have not eventuated.

They may well find a new channel for their fulfilment.

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.