WOULD MALAYSIA REALLY BE BETTER IF THE OPPOSITION HAD WON GE13?
(CiliSos) – Everything would be nice… for a while.
NOTE: Because this article discusses an alternate historical timeline in Malaysian politics, the words ‘Government’ and ‘Opposition’ are sometimes interchanged. In order to avoid confusion, we’ve colour-coded the words: Orange for Pakatan Rakyat, and Blue for Barisan Nasional. Also, these are THEORIES only, so don’t flame us yeah?
For us Malaysians, the teh tarik glass is always half empty. One of our favourite pastimes, alongside complaining (our national sport!), lepaking, and watching mat sallehs kicking a ball into a net, is imagining how things might have turned out better if we had made different decisions in life. We often ask ourselves questions like:
- “What if I had asked for that lenglui’s number?”
- “What if I had taken amma’s advice and studied medicine?”
- “What if I had answered C instead of A?” (some of us are still haunted by this one to this day)
But recently, with our gomen facing uncertain times, perhaps one of the biggest and most important questions of all that Malaysians like to ask ourselves is:
“What if Pakatan Rakyat had won GE13 instead of BN?!”
Of course, Pakatan Rakyat doesn’t exist anymore, but sometimes it’s nice to just take a trip down imagination lane and think of the possibilities. We speak to Dr. Gordon Cavanaugh of the Ontario College of Teachers, who taught in a local Malaysian university for 6 years. With his background in Canadian and European History, alongside his thorough understanding of Malaysian politics, we decided to approach him to give us his informed opinion, which he graciously did!
So what would Malaysia look like had the Opposition won GE13? With the help of Dr. Cavanaugh, these are some of the possible scenarios that we came up with:
