EPISODE one of season four of Borgen, my favourite political drama, is called “The Future Is Female”.
Borgen is a hit Netflix series which revolves around Birgitte Nyborg, the fictional first female prime minister of Denmark. It originally aired in Denmark in 2010, when life seemed to imitate art after the country elected its first woman prime minister, Helle Thorning-Schmidt, in 2011.
In the latest season, Nyborg, having had to quit previously, is a foreign minister now under another woman PM who tags her social media postings with #thefutureisfemale.
Coincidentally, Prof James Chin talked to me about Scandinavian politics when I asked him about his Facebook post. On Thursday, Prof Chin, from the Asia Institute at the University of Tasmania, Australia, shared a snapshot of a news article with the headline “Zuraida is now PBM’s president-designate”.
It was about Parti Bangsa Malaysia (PBM) accepting Datuk Zuraida Kamaruddin as a member and elevating her to president-designate. The Ampang MP quit Parti Pribumi Bersatu Malaysia (Bersatu) on May 26 to join PBM.
“I support this move because (1) PBM is a multiracial party and (2) we need more female party leaders. I truly believe we would live in a less crazy society if we had more women holding key political positions. Male politicians in power make too many crazy decisions,” Prof Chin wrote.
Curious to know why the professor, known to be critical of Malaysian politicians, endorsed the Plantation Industries and Commodities Minister, I contacted him.
“Don’t forget, recently Malaysian cyberspace went crazy over the Finland government. There was a meme – that showed an all-female government – that went around many, many times. Everyone got excited. I’m just wondering whether that excitement is also within the wider public,” he said.
He was referring to Finland electing a woman-led coalition government in 2019. At that time, 12 of the 19 of Prime Minister Sanna Marin’s Cabinet members were women, meaning Finland’s government had the second-highest percentage of female ministers in the world after Spain.
I asked Prof Chin about his thoughts on PBM, launched in December last year, being a multiracial party and if Zuraida has the credentials to be a woman leader in a country with a political glass ceiling for women.
He said that in the last few years, especially since the 2013 General Election, he believes support for multiracial parties has gone downhill a little bit. He argued that if we were to look at the 2018 General Election, even though people say that Pakatan Harapan (which back then consisted of PKR, DAP, Amanah and Bersatu) was a multiracial coalition, it wasn’t really.
“If you look at the voting pattern for the biggest multiracial party in Pakatan, which is PKR, its multiracial votes have decreased slightly. DAP’s multiracial vote, if you minus the Indian component, has been stagnant for many, many years,” he said.
Prof Chin noted that PBM is the latest manifestation of a strong desire in a certain section of the Malaysian political class to create a truly multiracial party.
“I’ve always supported having a multiracial party. The best example of a multiracial party in Malaysian history people say is Gerakan, but it is not. It is PPP (the People’s Progressive Party that was formed in 1953 by the Seenivasagam brothers to oppose the Alliance). But the PPP did not survive.”
Prof Chin is hoping that PBM will be a more successful experiment. He contends that we need more than just one cluster of multiracial parties to show the Malaysian polity that it is possible to have multiracial parties leading Malaysia.
“Right now, you have ethnic political parties leading a multiracial coalition. That is a very different thing. So that’s the reason why, in general, I support the concept of a multiracial party. It has not been successful, but it doesn’t mean we should not try,” he said.
On his point about women and decisions, Prof Chin said it is fairly obvious that the “crazy decisions” made in the last 20 to 30 years were made by men.
“So if you put the women in charge, I’m not saying you won’t get a crazy decision. I’m just saying there is less chance of a crazy decision,” he said.
“But of course, my critics will say that I can say that because there were a lot fewer women in key political positions. And because men were in key political positions, they were forced to make difficult decisions which turned out to be wrong.”
But, Prof Chin argued, that is not the point. We live in the 21st century, and Malaysia has always projected itself as a progressive Muslim polity: “If that’s the case, I don’t see why we should not allow women to hold key government positions.”
On Zuraida, a former PKR vice-president and PKR Wanita chief, Prof Chin said: “If you look at her political career carefully, you’ll see that she was part of the group that sort of pushed quite strongly for PKR to remain multiracial.
“The term they used in the old days was Malay led-party rather than ketuanan Melayu (Malay supremacy). She’s one of the few Malay politicians who seems to believe that it should be multiracial, but since the Malays are the majority of this country, it will be Malay-led but not Malay-dominated. I believe that she believes in that,” he said.
Most of the comments on Prof Chin’s post were negative – what does he say to that?
He believes the reason for the negative comments is because the public holds two things against Zuraida: One, she was part of the Sheraton Move in which some PKR and Bersatu MPs ditched the Pakatan government in February 2020 – “So people are angry that she caused the downfall of the Pakatan government,” he said.
Two, the people are angry with Zuraida over “katak” politics (frog politics refers to politicians who jump to another party).
“All this is true. But that doesn’t negate the points I made earlier, that in Malaysian politics we haven’t had a history of women at the very top of the ladder and that we should give them a chance. Like most things in life, two contradicting points don’t mean they’re not right. Both can be right at the same time,” he said.
On whether PBM could win a Parliamentary seat in the 15th General Election (GE15), Prof Chin noted that the party’s track record in the recent Johor state polls was terrible. It lost in all the four state seats it contested.
However, he noted that a nationwide federal election is much harder to predict – “It is too early to predict now. People who claim they can predict (GE15 results) are either bomoh (shamans) or just plain crazy,” he said.
On his advice to Zuraida, Prof Chin quipped: “I’m the last person to offer advice. Everybody hates me!
“Look, I think there’s a space for multiracial politics in Malaysia, primarily among certain segments of the population, mostly in urban areas.
“If there’s going to be any advice, it is that you should practice what you preach,” he said.
“If you believe in a multiracial party, you have to ensure that everybody’s represented at the top table in terms of candidates. There’s a wide spectrum of candidates for every ethnic group and every segment of Malaysian society. So I don’t think that’s very difficult.”
Is PBM the future of multiracial Malaysia and women leaders?
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