COMMENT | Snail pace reforms: First-year assessment of govt

COMMENT | The Coalition for Clean and Fair Elections (Bersih) congratulates the unity government for some of the institutional reforms carried out in its first year and urges for more as promised by the respective coalitions and parties in the government, in particularly Pakatan Harapan and BN.

We opined that a post-election coalition government should not be an excuse to abandon all reform promises made in the two coalitions’ manifestos, especially given the fact that:

a) There are four major shared promises in both BN and Harapan’s manifestos that have not been fully implemented

b) Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim himself was the leader of the Harapan coalition at the time these promises were made to voters

Specifically on electoral and institutional reforms, our overall assessment is that while the unity government has made commendable progress in some areas such as empowering parliamentary special select committees (PSSCs), their performance is below expectations.

Malaysian voters were...