COMMENT Not so long ago, PKR was the opposition party that the politically conscious, distressed by the depredations of Umno-BN, headed for in the quest to end the ruling coalition’s prolonged misrule.

Now DAP has supplanted it as the preferred vehicle to bring about political change in Malaysia.

Last month, national literary laureate A Samad Said ( photo ), a high-profile social activist campaigning in the last eight years for electoral and other reforms, bypassed PKR for DAP as his choice for effecting reform.

This month constitutional law exegete Abdul Aziz Bari decided to abandon PKR and enlist with the DAP; in signing up, Aziz said he found the DAP more inclusive and meritocratic.

Both enlistments are significant in what they reflect about the DAP and in what is implied of PKR: the one has the mojo for bringing change, the other is simply losing it.

What's worse, PKR does not seem to know why it has lost it.

The party is puzzled that Samad Said did not join them and now is shrugging its shoulders at Aziz Bari’s abandonment.

Aziz, formerly a law professor at Universiti Islam Antarabangsa (UIA) Malaysia who had to quit under pressure for his political opinions, was the PKR candidate for Sabak Bernam in the 2013 general election.

He campaigned hard for the seat and came up short of his Umno opponent by some 3,000 votes.

He had pressed then-PKR menteri besar Khalid Ibrahim, with whom he had a good relationship, to have potholed roads in the constituency repaved and streams in low-lying areas dredged to prevent flooding.

Khalid said he would have things done, but a penchant for micromanagement always threatened to leave him with little time to fulfil his promises.

By election time in May 2013, those alleviations were not done and Aziz wound up with the deficit.

More frustration was in store.

Aziz is not allied to Khalid’s replacement as MB, Azmin Ali.

When Aziz was beaten by seven votes to the PKR Sabak Bernam divisional chairpersonship by a virtual nobody, the former don found he could not obtain support for his desire to become the constituency’s coordinator.

He has to be the coordinator if he wants to be the elected MP of Sabak Bernam at the next general election.

Smouldering political strife

Azmin is not in any hurry to appoint constituency coordinators in seats in Selangor where PKR had contested and lost.

He wants to be sure of a candidate’s allegiance in the smouldering factional strife between his forces and Anwar’s in the party.

The fault is not entirely Azmin’s.

He was the clear winner in the three-way battle (other contestants were Khalid and Saifuddin Nasution) for the deputy president’s post in the chaotic party elections held last year.

An emphatic victory could not get him and his faction even a-half share of the plum appointed positions in the polls’ aftermath, leave alone the menteri besar’s job when the party deemed Khalid a liability who had to be replaced.

But Azmin did get the MB’s job, courtesy of palace support and an assist from PAS.

Now Azmin is indebted to PAS and precariously placed in the wrangling between DAP and PAS for electoral and executive advantage in Selangor.

It’s all a convoluted state of affairs which could have been prevented had PKR been less forgetful of its original principles and more understanding of the reality that factions are endemic to democratic parties and the best way to manage them is cooptation and not marginalisation.

Having had its start 16 years ago from the travails of Anwar, PKR is discovering that an aversion for Umno-BN is not healthy spawning grounds for enduring attachment to liberal democratic values.

That is why it has found it easy to forget those values, as when it named Dr Wan Azizah Wan Ismail as its initial candidate for Selangor MB.

Azmin has turned out to be a much better MB than his predecessor but he is unable to rise above the factional fray.

The casualties are people like Aziz Bari, a great catch for the PKR when he joined them after leaving UIA and a profound loss to a party deprived of his constitutional expertise.

That expertise is useful for parsing the constitutional turf from which to tell assorted Islamists in the opposition’s ranks that such  nostrums as hudud are not necessary for the maintenance of order in civil society.

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.