How to get better GE14 candidates
If Election 2013 was about voting along party lines, Election 2018 will be about candidates.
Boo Su-Lyn, The Malay Mail Online
During the 13th general election five years ago, the prevailing sentiment (at least in the cities) was to vote for the Opposition that had then offered not only the promise of a new government, but more importantly, hope for a post-racial country as the Chinese and Malay-Muslim parties of DAP and PAS worked together.
Pakatan Rakyat’s (PR) choice of candidates almost didn’t seem to matter and Malays and Chinese happily voted for the DAP and PAS respectively.
ow in 2018, that hope has long dissipated, even though the new Opposition pact has rebranded itself the Alliance of Hope, and some do not feel that there is much difference between Pakatan Harapan (PH) and the long-ruling Barisan Nasional (BN).
Such sentiments came out strongly in a storm of Facebook posts and tweets on the loose hashtag movement, #UndiRosak, which advocated spoiling one’s vote in the 14th general elections (GE14).
Part of the frustration that so-called “idealistic” millennials like me feel stems from the fact the Malaysia’s democracy is very young. We only just got rid of BN’s decades-long parliamentary supermajority 10 years ago.
The state governments of Selangor and Penang have been under a different administration — PKR and DAP — for only two terms, though in a normal democracy that sees the regular rotation of governments, two terms is probably enough and the administrations should switch again.
It is only now that we begin to see the flourishing of not just human rights organisations led by seasoned activists, but also budding civil society movements led by ordinary residents in Kuala Lumpur, like in Taman Tun Dr Ismail and Taman Desa, who are doing things like sit-in protests, petitions, and town hall meetings to advocate their interests.
Letter-writing campaigns to one’s representatives, for example, are extremely common in mature democracies like the United States, but they are practically unheard of here in Malaysia.
If we want better representatives in the coming election, we voters must work hard ourselves to demand quality candidates who will uphold our interests. We cannot just sit back and rant on Facebook, without personally contacting our candidates to tell them what policies we want them to make.
This is why BEBAS, a civil rights group I am a part of, recently launched a campaign called #CabarCalon.
The campaign aims to get voters to press their GE14 candidates to do three things: enact anti-discrimination legislation to prevent property owners and businesses from discriminating based on race, stop the use of taxpayers’ monies for religious purposes, and declare their assets before running for office.
It is a bottom-up approach. Rather than simply tell BN and PH, as large political entities, what kind of changes we want to see in the country, we aim to put pressure on individual candidates.
