NOVEMBER 15 — It is not going to be easy to break the hegemonic political machinery in Malaysia, but it is incredibly necessary. In recent weeks, political satirist Fahmi Reza has embarked on a new venture of providing basic political education to youths such as political ideologies, our systems of governance, how voting works to form governments and what other electoral systems exist. His “Kelas Demokrasi” sessions first began on Tik-Tok that has thousands of Malaysians tuning in but since last week, he began a national roadshow to conduct these classes in universities across the country.
Since then, every public university has either rejected entry for him to present or kicked him out, forcing him to head to nearby locations to continue. Each of these sessions has attracted dozens, if not hundreds of students, eager to learn about politics as Malaysia votes our new government this Saturday. Fundamentally, these rejections from public universities are due to path dependency based on the nature of our political machinery in this country.
Our country is infamous for having poor political education at all levels. Aside from just a brief and basic introduction to the basic governing structure of our country in secondary school, Malaysian students are essentially left in the dark about how politics actually work (i.e. what are political ideologies, policies and how does voting work)
For the most part, the previous BN government’s approach to teaching politics was through subtle integration with political values through government systems. Prior to GE14, this involved normalising the idea that BN is synonymous with government and to make any other party in charge seem foreign and impractical. For youths, this is essentially done through the education system, in particular the public tertiary education systems.
Using the Universities and University Colleges Act (AUKU) as a shield, external political entities such as Civil Society Organisations and opposition parties were not allowed to enter public university spaces. This allows only government aligned student bodies and other integrated organisations (such as ethnic and religious associations) to essentially begin indoctrinating students with government support. The approach is highly subtle, predicated on social pressure, and is focused on long term development of affinities and support to the government.
Essentially, the government would have three to four years to take their time to instil political support to their party without ever introducing democratic political concepts and ideas. So, by the time it came for these students to graduate, that coincided with when they’d be able to vote. The pathway to government support would be deeply embedded by then.
And then, with the passing of the Undi18 act, this brought considerable change to the political landscape. The earlier voting age meant that this indoctrination pathway was no longer viable as there is now a generation of youth, who have yet to be moulded to blindly support a party, that have lots of questions about politics because they are now given the agency to vote.
This situation is of course incredibly scary for political parties because it introduces a wild card that is not tied to any traditional party machinery and probably one of the reasons why there is so much uncertainty over this election. Uncertainty is the biggest enemy for political strategists and plans, especially in this country.
A quick segue into the importance of political machinery: Political machinery in the Malaysian context refers to the network of local political party divisions and branches that engage with local communities. Composed of mainly low level party members, these are the primary capillaries of grassroot political engagement with voters. These branches often work together with locals to understand their issues, seek solutions to their problems and to also impart information about the party through these activities. The strength of a party in a particular constituency is rooted in how embedded their local machineries are; how many branches are there, how many members and how engaged they are with the local populations.
For political planners, these local party machineries serve as the primary metric to measure grassroots political support as they are able to survey and check-in with voters at the local level. These political machineries are fine-tuned and mature political vehicles that can get good and reliable estimations of public support and political sentiments (As opposed to the reliance on finicky online spaces which is susceptible to cybertrooper manipulation and disconnected nature of the so-called “Twitterjaya”).
As most voter engagement with local machineries tends to be focused on immediate local issues such as potholes in roads, flood relief, or rising cost of food, this keeps the population focused on highly local and contextualised issues rather than looking at the big picture. Every election is often focused on “bread and butter” issues because that’s the most organic concern that emerges from most local machineries. All our political parties understand that is the nature of politics in this country and you must have this machinery in place if you wish to have any chance of even connecting with voters.
Without a doubt, Fahmi’s classes are throwing a wrench into this traditional mindset. If you teach your youth to think critically about their politics, about what ideologies and policies mean to you, and how to think about the true value of your vote, you’re empowering youth (and the next generation of voters) to think beyond local party machineries. And that scares the political establishment (across the political spectrum) and is going to make future elections more interesting for the rest of us who are fed up with the current way of running things.
* This op-ed is an adaptation of a Twitter thread by the same author with additional contextual information provided.
** Dr Benjamin YH Loh is a senior lecturer at the School of Media and Communication at Taylor’s University and an associate with the Asia Centre in Bangkok.
*** This is the personal opinion of the writer or organisation and does not necessarily represent the views of Malay Mail.
