From Consensus to Conflict: The Experience of Pan-Malaysian Islamic Party (PAS) in Barisan Alternatif and Pakatan Rakyat

Abstract

This article is an in depth discourse of how the Pan-Malaysian Islamic party (PAS) manages to zealously safeguard their fundamental political tenets while at the same time engaging in a new political coalition in an Alternative Front (BA) in 1999 and Pakatan Rakyat (PR) in 2008. These political leagues would assume a lasting feature as PAS explores a new terrain of cooperation that traverse more than an electoral pact. These collaborations which incorporated their shared beliefs and concerns for the sake of democracy, justice, freedom and good governance have unfolded up a new frontier of political leverage for PAS. This also suggests that the party should be less affectionate to its intrinsic party ideologues as it embraces the new coalition’s common struggles. The qualitative approach of this study derived its data from extensive verbal interviews with seven prominent top key leaders in the PAS political leadership hierarchy. Several primary documents and minutes of numerous meetings are also scrutinously gleaned over for more informative details. The main striking discovery of this research illustrates that although PAS hopes that its collaboration with other parties would be an endurance one rather than winning an election. However, this never materialises as its efforts to reconcile between the differences of the party inherent principles and the coalition collective objectives ends in a stalemate situation. PAS has an underlying commitment that this cooperation would be able to expedite in fulfilling their Islamic agenda in establishing an Islamic Nation and the implementation of the Islamic hudud law which, on the other hand, do not augur well with the alliances common objectives and eventually imperilled their commutual understanding. This research is relevance in the sense that it looks at the survival of an Islamic party existence within the realm of a turbulent political coalition with other parties of different births. This study to a certain extent invariably interprets that the collaboration of PAS in the BA and PR, rhetorically speaking, is more at a stage of a coalition of convenience and of a short-lived in nature.