Will ‘guided democracy’
take hold of Penang DAP?
Today’s meeting of the Penang DAP will choose a new lineup, dismayingly under guidance from the central leadership.
From Terence Netto
The Penang DAP elects its leaders when it meets this morning. The meeting is important in what the poll results will indicate as to who the state party wants for its leadership in the post-Chow Kon Yeow era.
Incumbent state chairman Chow is not standing in the party elections because he is in his second and final term as chief minister of Penang. The state constitution bars him from seeking a third term.
The word is that the tensions between him and national party chairman Lim Guan Eng has reached such an extent that Chow feared he would not even obtain a nomination to contest.
The episode was a confirmation of Lim’s hold on the party more than it was of Chow’s diminished stature.
This is not a good reflection of the state of matters within the Penang DAP because it shows that budding leaders prefer to swim in a powerful leader’s slipstream rather than intimate they might have to chart a new course.
Often this ends in leaders showing their true selves when they actually succeed, in which instance intramural tensions surface between the neophyte’s new initiatives and the cohort’s reliance on a reflex rather than a fresh agenda.
Sterility is the result and a state party that has long been in power goes to seed. This looming possibility is made worse by the party’s central leadership openly suggesting who to choose.
Secretary-general Loke Siew Fook aired his preference for Steven Sim, MP for Bukit Mertajam and federal minister, and for Lim Hui Ying, MP for Tanjong and federal deputy minister.
He suggested that Chow’s successor as chief minister ought to come from this pairing for elevation when the vote takes place.
This is a version of the ‘guided democracy’ that Umno used to practise in the years when Dr Mahathir Mohamad was consolidating his hold over the party.
Before this guidance became the norm, the top leader preferred suggesting what areas the party needed to explore to assure its future.
This manoeuvre left it to electors to deduce which personnel would then be suitable to place in the saddle – a subtler and better process, encouraging debate and a higher form of intraparty discourse.
DAP is in the fourth term of its ascendancy in Penang politics, a period when a political party prefers to rely on a reflex rather than a fresh idea most times.
Sim added freshness to the DAP ranks when he emerged almost a decade ago, making overtures to Bukit Mertajam’s struggling Malay youths.
He seemed like a leader willing to blaze the path to changing the Malay perception that DAP is an incorrigibly Chinese party.
Now, in his quest for Malay favour, he has tried to ingratiate himself by saying Malaysia’s independence has no meaning if Palestinians do not obtain an independent state.
That’s quite something for a rising young politician from the DAP to say.
As for Lim Hui Ying, she is the daughter of Lim Kit Siang. The DAP is often reminded of the debt it owes to Kit Siang.
This debt would pay little heed to what the Latin poet Plutarch said about ingratitude towards their great leaders being the mark of strong peoples.
Terence Netto is a veteran journalist and an FMT reader.
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