COMMENT The new opposition coalition, Pakatan Harapan, is off and running.

Though they have made it their first business to announce a prime minister-designate in Anwar Ibrahim, they should have deferred the announcement till a more important matter was over and done with.

This is the acquiescence of all three components - DAP, PKR and Parti Amanah Negara (PAN) - to a common policy framework.

It is imperative that the preamble of this framework include an assurance that the coalition will be faithful to the founding principles of this country as outlined in the 1957 Merdeka Proclamation, Merdeka Constitution, and the 1963 Malaysia Agreement.

That way the framework will be a document with pan-Malaysian appeal.

The signature of all three components would render the document the sanctity of legal writ.

It was just as well that PAS stayed out of the meeting yesterday that led to the formation of Pakatan Harapan.

Realistically, there was no chance that under the leadership of its president, Abdul Hadi Awang, and spiritual leader, Dr Haron Din, PAS would have agreed to join Pakatan Harapan.

They would certainly have not agreed to making Anwar the PM-designate. That we know from what happened just before the last general election (GE13) in May 2013.

At that time, they disagreed with the Pakatan Rakyat consensus that Anwar was the coalition's choice as PM should it win GE13.

PAS wanted Tengku Razaleigh Hamzah, Umno MP for Gua Musang, as PM but did not publicise their choice but they let Anwar know that he was not their choice.

This is surreptitious politics which Pakatan Harapan must disdain.

Hence the need for deliberate haste in getting the framework composed, signed and publicised.

The next task of Pakatan Harapan is PKR’s to-do.

The party was hasty in concluding a pact with PAS to avoid three-cornered fights in the next general election (GE14).

What would be the status of the pact now that it is almost certain that PAS would contest against Amanah and DAP in the seats the latter two presently hold.

What would it do for component party collaboration within Pakatan Harapan when it is seen that PKR is indifferent to the reality that a party it has an electoral pact with is selective about applying the principle that three-cornered fights among the opposition be avoided?

Pact should encompass whole opposition

PKR would have been in a better position to conclude an electoral pact with PAS after the formation of Pakatan Harapan rather than before because, then, it would have been less difficult to tell PAS that the pact should encompass the whole opposition and not just a couple of parties.

Now PKR has no leverage to tell PAS that, not that the telling would have led to PAS acquiescing to the demand for an all-encompassing electoral pact.

But there is something called underlying currents, factors that flow under the surface of events whose outcome we cannot predict but whose dynamics impact the choices and decisions made by the players on history’s stage.

Would the Umno liberal, Saifuddin Abdullah ( photo ), have attended yesterday’s meeting that led to the formation of Pakatan Harapan had ongoing events in the 1MDB issue not steadily and negatively impacted the position of Prime Minister Najib Abdul Razak?

Would he have attended the meeting had not the red-shirt demonstration on Sept 16 not exhibited elements of racial chauvinism, repugnant to his liberal dispositions?

Is Saifuddin the only Umno liberal who is leaning towards the opposition simply from a growing realisation that the party is beyond hope of redemption?

Politics is not a zero-sum game, neither are political realities sequestered in a zone that is exempt from the shifts and changes to opinion formed on the basis of unfolding events.

Two decisions yesterday by the judiciary - one the quashing of a suspension order on two publications and the other requiring the Umno president to file his defence in a case where he is asked to explain his stewardship of the party - attest the validity of the view that the political arena is never static; it is fluid rather and continually being influenced by currents that flow under the surface of political history.

To assume, as PKR, does that the strong grassroots of PAS is a fixed political reality is akin to assuming that Malaysia’s judiciary is fixed in its post-Salleh Abbas-impeachment trauma of subservience and compliance to the executive.

Not really.

The dice is always rolling in the Malaysian political scene and those dependent on what seems like fixities are apt to be surprised by the fluxes and shifts of a dynamic, not static, arena.

Therefore make haste, deliberatively.

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.