COMMENT A more accurate index of how newly-formed opposition coalition Pakatan Harapan is doing, is not in its constituents' readiness to endorse the platitudes of general agreement - such as they did on Jan 9 - but in their willingness to adhere to the more telling, if prosaic, details of intra-coalition cooperation.

The fact that DAP member Abdul Aziz Bari - a nominee of the party for seats on the Ampang Jaya Municipal Council (AJMC) - was not included in the list that would be sworn in today, says a lot about the state of internal relations within Harapan.

DAP had previously named Aziz in a list of six candidates that the party was entitled to nominate as AJMC members.

When the entire list of members for the new term was announced yesterday, his name had not been included and DAP wound up with five members, one short of their quota.

It is an open secret that Aziz, a former law professor at Universiti Islam Antarabangsa (UIA), is being readied by DAP as a candidate for a state seat in Selangor at the next general election (GE14).

Aziz had joined DAP in July last year after a frustrating time with PKR. He was the party's candidate for the Sabak Bernam parliamentary constituency in the GE13.

He lost by a little over 3,000 votes, a result that could have been averted had he been successful at obtaining allocations from the then Selangor Menteri Besar Abdul Khalid Ibrahim - formerly of PKR - for flash flood mitigation and blocked canal clearance projects in his semi-rural seat.

Khalid, interested to help Aziz, just could not find the time to come round to actually doing so because of his penchant for micromanagement where delegation would have seen that things like what Aziz had wanted done in Sabak Bernam in the run-up to the May 2013 general election would have got done.

More frustrations for Aziz

Defeat at the national polls was followed by more frustration for Aziz in that he could not obtain from his party the position of constituency coordinator for Sabak Bernam, a post that would have brought with it funds for area projects and the raised profile that accompanies it.

Selangor Menteri Besar Azmin Ali of PKR is leery about appointing someone worthy from his party unless, of course, he is certain of the appointee's allegiance.

PKR is split between pro-Azmin and anti-Azmin factions, a consequence of the destructive battles of 2014 when former opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim myopically decided to nominate his wife, Dr Wan Azzah Ismail, to replace Khalid as Selangor MB and compounded that error by backing Saifuddin Nasution's attempt to unseat Azmin as deputy president in the party polls that year.

The consequences of those errors of judgment have left the party split into factions, with the importunate winner of the two battles, Azmin, determined to consolidate his faction, even if some of his efforts in that respect, redound to the party's detriment.

Aziz, essentially a scholar with scant taste for factional politics, fled from the strife in PKR to DAP where his presence has helped enhance the party's outreach to Malays.

Aziz has distinguished himself over the last decade and a half as a voice of democratic constitutionalism, holding forth on issues of constitutional law with a clarity and consistency that make him the leading candidate to become attorney-general, should an opposition coalition win the general election.

Now Aziz is prevented from even becoming a councillor, a launch pad for securing a state seat in GE14 which would place him - should DAP win a state assembly plurality within Harapan - as a candidate to become MB of Selangor.

PKR, in general - and Azmin, in particular - would surely be uncomfortable at the prospect.

That leaves Aziz baulked - though not beaten - and Harapan ardent about aspiration, but derelict at execution.

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.