F
or a political party that was once a force to be reckoned with, the figures aren’t flattering. The Malaysian Chinese Association accounts for just one of
Malaysia’s 222 members of parliament, six of the 70 senators and two of the more than 500 assemblymen in state seats. And if social media is the future, the figures look even worse: it has just 6,135 Twitter followers, compared to 142,000 for the Democratic Action Party – its chief rival for the ethnic Chinese vote – and 100,000 for its fellow opposition party, the United Malays National Organisation (Umno).
Its outlook wasn’t always so grim. As recently as a year ago it was flying high as part of the governing Barisan Nasional coalition and was able to count upon three cabinet ministers, full coffers and a seemingly assured place in government thanks to its membership in the coalition, despite flagging support from the ethnic Chinese community. MCA’s support base had, for generations (bar a slight blip in the 1969 election), been rock solid, stretching back to the party’s very creation in the 1950s, and when, in 2016, it became the first foreign political party to publicly support China’s
Belt and Road Initiative, it seemed like a political masterstroke – a move that would appeal to both its voters and the pro-China prime minister of the time, Najib Razak.
To the sharpest observers, there were signs things weren’t entirely right, with the MCA’s public support beginning to droop a little after 2008 – the same year a sex tape featuring Chua Soi Lek, the party’s then 61-year-old president, emerged. Still, few would have guessed then that in 10 years’ time the party would be dumped from power, feuding with its former ruling coalition partner Umno and largely abandoned by its voters.
But then few people foresaw the watershed election victory last May that saw the nonagenarian
Mahathir Mohamad lead the Pakatan Harapan alliance to victory over the Barisan Nasional, ending its more than six decades of uninterrupted rule.
GOODBYE GLORY DAYS
Experts say that key to understanding the party’s fall from grace is to recognise what had made it so popular in the first place, when it was created nearly 70 years ago as the first party to represent the Chinese minority in a multiracial country where nearly seven in 10 people are Bumiputra (a term for ethnic Malays and indigenous people).
