COMMENT | Participatory democracy - a Malaysian attempt

COMMENT | I recently wrote an article where I picked apart the notion of parliamentary democracy as it is practised in Malaysia and made the statement that it is not what our nation needs. The article itself was perhaps a little sensational. I didn’t reject parliamentary democracy in its entirety, rather the notion that in its current form it disempowers the common man and only empowers the elite.

To understand the alternative to this we must ask at least two questions. One, what is the end-state that we want? Two, how do we achieve this end-state? In this article, I will explore the first of these questions.

What are we, then, trying to achieve? As I stated in the previous article, the problem with the current political system is the alienation of the common man from making important decisions as a collective unit with their fellow countrymen. There is no room to raise the issues faced by common Malaysians to parliament outside of expecting elected officials to do their jobs. However, this is demonstrably a huge pitfall as the people parliamentarians really listen to are their wealthy benefactors.

To fish for votes, they simply tack on a veneer of identity politics, with the ethno-fascist Perikatan NasionalN/BN/Muafakat Nasional and what have you seemingly fighting for Malay-Muslim supremacy and the mainstream opposition in Pakatan Harapan merely playing the “we are better than them” role without any deep reformism.

This is why a significant portion of the latter was quickly subsumed into the former last year without common Malaysians having a say. The problem of party-hopping alone can show this clearly. What we need is a robust political system that encourages direct participation of common Malaysians and ensures there is enough power to hold elected officials accountable. For this, we must be much more granular than we are now and tackle the problem at the root, i.e the residential areas of the people.

At the lowest level of governance, there must be ...