COMMENT If politics is the art of the possible, compromise is its blood plasma.

If Malaysia's politics is stalemated between an Umno-BN that is reflexively – though not monolithically – for Prime Minister Najib Abdul Razak to continue in office and an opposition which knows that the longer he stays the more decrepit the system becomes, then the avenue is open to a compromise that will ease the country out of its present economic and political malaise.

Just as the formation of the BN four decades ago was a compromise that was regarded as an amelioration of the politics of that time, the required compromise to eject Najib would be a palliation of the fraught circumstances that presently obtain.

One won't arrive at that compromise from an attitude that holds 'What's mine is sacrosanct, what's yours is negotiable.'

Both sides must think anew and act anew for the stakes are no less than the pulling back of the country from the precipice on which it is precariously perched.

For cooperation between BN dissenters and an opposition united on renoving Najib, the two sides need to relent on core demands and meet halfway.

There's a leader available in Tengku Razaleigh Hamzah, the Umno MP for Gua Musang, around whom the sides that need to come together can readily rally.

He has the economic acumen and enough practical political sense to manage the compromises that need to be struck in order to make the bargain between a rump BN and a united opposition work.

His non-partisan stature, non-confrontational style, and an ability to move matters along without dealing with the substance of the issues raised would be critical to the whole outcome.

It's not that he does not have the substance to deal with the issues, but some matters are better left to the adjudication of a later day.

Under Ku Li's stewardship

At a wisened 78 years, Razaleigh has accumulated the experiential wisdom to differentiate between what can be accomplished in the 33 months to the next general election (GE14) and what has to wait.

Meanwhile, our straitened economy and sulferous politics demand immediate nostrums.

And that Ku Li, as he is popularly known, can provide on the strength of his past as finance minister, his knowledge of our economic history, and on the basis of prescriptions he voiced in periodic disquisitions on the state of the nation over the past eight years.

Men of destiny have their starts; Ku Li had his in being the scion of Kelantan's first appointed menteri besar.

He would have been prime minister of Malaysia had presumption not undid him earlier in his career when as a formidably popular Umno vice-president, he had the No 1 post well within his grasp.

But he didn't reckon with a scheming Mahathir – nobody could – among whose strengths was shrewd calculation of the impact of competitors' weaknesses and how these can be levered to his advantage.

But now all that is water under the bridge and Mahathir needs to recognise that it is Ku Li who can pull it off – our withdrawal from the precipice towards which the country is galloping with Najib in charge.

If we are not already a failed state, we are headed to being one, under Najib's continued stewardship.

You know you have consensus on that score when opinion makers as divergent as the fervently pro-Umno columnist Kadir Jasin and DAP adviser Lim Kit Siang agree that the ship of state is at a precarious pass.

Cometh a national unity gov't

The dissenters in Umno must atone for the party's reckless abandon in allowing a person with Najib's baggage to become PM.

Now he cannot leave office for fear that what possibly awaits him in retirement.

This was not what Umno's two previous prime ministerial retirees-under-duress had to face: Tunku Abdul Rahman and Abdullah Ahmad Badawi quit rather than see the party erupt from fracticide if they had chosen to stay.

It was graceful of them to yield what they could no longer withhold.

In the perspective of the intervening years, and in light of the current occupant's obduracy, their withdrawals must be seen as just graceful but, more importantly, as virtuous.

Virtuous atonement by primarily Umno (and BN) dissenters for the irresponsibility of allowing a leader with baggage to become PM would presently take the form of agreement to back the no-confidence motion against the government at the next session of Parliament.

Mature recognition by a united opposition of the precariousness of the country's situation would take the form of joining a rump of BN in not only supporting the no-confidence motion, but also backing a subsequent government of national unity Ku Li's steering.

A united opposition need only demand that the Election Commision must be headed by a new chairperson of proven impartiality and that all future judicial appointments be persons of the calibre of Justice Hishamuddin Yunos.

Those two demands would be sufficient to place the opposition in as advantageous a position for GE14 as they cannot under a continued premiership by Najib.

Cometh the hour, cometh Ku Li and a necessitous government of national unity.

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.