Can Pakatan Rakyat be a credible alternative?

Malays and Muslims makeup around 60% of Malaysia's population and is the majority community in Malaysia. Chinese is 32%, Indians 7% and the rest are other races.

So in order for the country to be stable, the Malay community must be of priority feels itself stable first. If there is feeling of instability among the Malays then it will naturally affect the nation as a whole.

For comparision Indonesia's population consisted of Javanese 70% and the other 30% Non Javanese like Sumatrans, Bugis, Molluccan and others.

Indonesian politics and civil services since its independence in 1945 have been dominated by the Javanese.

In Malaysia, likewise the Malays have been the base in the politics and civil services of the country.

Generally the Malays are comfortable with Barisan Nasional which has ruled the country since 1957 (the Alliance, its predecessor until 1970) which is dominated by Umno until the last general elections which saw BN losing a lot of seats. This occured in Umno but especially for MCA, MIC and Gerakan which saw their leaders generally wiped out of Parliament.

The question to be asked is can the Pakatan Rakyat be an alternative to BN?

An indication of this can be seen from the stand of Pas when Anwar Ibrahim tried his 16th September 2008 grand scheme. This is when he tried to win over 31 BN MPs to cross over to PR.

Pas made it clear in the event that Anwar is successful it would not join the new PR Federal government if there are more Non Malay/Non Muslim MPs than the Malay/Muslim MPs.

The message sent by Pas is that the PR Government should be Malay based. This message is shared by the majority of Malays. Being the majority community it would be unacceptable to them to have a government dominated by the Non Malays. Malaysia have not reached the sort of political maturity as yet. The insecurities of the Malays are still in existence. Even though they are the majority community , economically they are very weak compared to the Chinese. We need time to solve their socio-economic problems. These needed to be handled with care.

Thus the question is can PR turns itself into a Malay-based coalition like BN in order to offer itself as an alternative? Will the majority of Malays be able to accept and be comfortable with a PR government at the Federal level? The recent Penanti bye elections which is a Malay majority area showed the lowest voter turnout rate in the Malaysian electoral history. Is it because BN did not put a candidate in the bye elections. Maybe.

In the final analysis these are among the main hurdles for PR to overcome if it wants to be a credible alternative to BN.