TWO PARTY SYSTEM IN MALAYSIA?

Does the recent General Elections see a two party system slowly being form in Malaysia?

The opinion of some political analyst is that the results of the elections clearly so. It strongly indicated that Malaysians want an alternative to the Barisan Nasional (BN).

The perception among the voters is that BN has become too corrupted and too powerful and hence the need for a mechanism to check it.

But the alternative Pakatan Rakyat (PR) does not have a card blanc to do according to its whims and fancy. The missteps done by Lim Guan Eng on the abolition of the New Economic Policy in Penang, the public relation mistakes made by Teresa Kok and Tan Sri Khalid Ibrahim on the way the announcement was done on the big pig farms in Selangor showed that there is an emerging sophistication among the political players and the rakyat in molding public opinions.

The check and balance is not a one way traffic as it used to be like before i.e between the BN government and the opposition parties and NGOs. Now even a PR state government policy initiative can be attacked by an NGO. Thus when Selangor wanted to introduce a levy on foreign workers it was heavily critised by Suaram an NGO that was once allied to PR elements before the elections.

All of this should and would augur well for Malaysia as only the best policies will be able to survive the glare of critisms by either side of the political divide.