The Government Always Gets In?

"It doesn't matter who you vote for, the government always gets in."  I don't know where I picked up that bit of wisdom from, a toilet door possibly, but it lodged in my mind because of its obvious truth.  Even when the "opposition" win they soon become the "government", taking to the trappings of power like ducks to water.  Not that in Malaysia the "opposition" has ever got a chance to savour the taste of victory.

I stayed up until midnight on 5th May to watch the election results trickle in and went to bed when the outcome was certain - a win for Barisan Nasional, the ruling coalition.  Over the following days the implications of the "victory" became more clear.  Far from being triumphal, the leading BN politicians have been grim faced, aware that in the last two general elections their hold on power has been steadily loosened.  In 2008 they lost their traditional two thirds parliamentary majority.  This time the opposition gained a few more seats and also actually got a majority of the popular vote, 51% to BN's 47%.  Despite this BN got 60% of the parliamentary seats, compared to the opposition's 40%, because of extensive gerrymandering.  Bearing in mind that the government also controls the media and the electoral process, it's reasonable to assume that had there been a level playing field the opposition would have won by a landslide.

Looking at the results more closely, the most significant change is that BN has lost control of urban Malaysia and increasingly relies on conservative rural Malays, who control a disproportionate share of the parliamentary seats, to stay in power.  To a degree this is also an ethnic split between the Malays, who make up about half of Malaysia's population and are dominant in rural West Malaysia and the Chinese who are about a quarter of the population and are concentrated in the major urban areas.  Speaking to people locally there is a lot of frustration about the result, but also seemingly an acceptance that the opposition will have to wait another five years, rather than take any kind of direct action.  The international community and the financial markets got the result they wanted and expected.  The day after the election the Malaysian stock market hit a lifetime high and the shares of CIMB bank, whose Chief Executive just happens to be the PM's brother, rose 8.8%.

But can I honestly say that the UK is any more "democratic" than Malaysia?  The figures on the percentage of the popular vote gained by the government led me to do a bit of research.  In Malaysia, the 2013 election was the first time since independence in 1957 that the government failed to win a majority of the popular vote.  By contrast, in the UK the 2010 election was the first time since 1931 that a British government actually won more than 50% of the vote, because the Conservatives and Liberals formed a coalition.  For example, in 2005 the Labour party got 56% of the seats on 36% of the vote and in two elections since the second world war the party getting a majority of the seats actually got less votes than its nearest rival.  In addition, voter turnout in the Malaysian 2013 election was 85%, compared to just 61% in the UK in 2010, which means that a bigger percentage of Malaysia's population voted for BN in 2013, than voted for Conservatives and Liberals in 2010.  It also suggests that far more Malaysians believe in the power of democracy compared to the British.

To be fair to the UK, the opposition does have much more access to the media and electoral processes are less subject to fraud than in Malaysia.  But arguably Malaysians take democracy more seriously by striving to create political coalitions that mean that more Malaysians actually vote for their government in a polling booth than is usually the case in Britain.

OK, so in both countries it's the government that always gets in, but Malaysians still seem to hold on to the hope that voting can actually change things and isn't that what democracy is really about?