Party politics - or the lack of?

Day 661, 05:59 • Published in Malaysia Malaysia • by Nagyzee

Hello everyone,

I'm sorry for not writing a goodbye article at the end of my presidency, but hey, I'm still here just in another position. And I don't have any intentions of leaving either. I hope you'll look back with fond memories on my 3 months of presidency and while neglecting a few important things you'll agree with me that we together have accomplished quite a lot. Anyhow thanks for your time, for working with me, helping me, criticizing me and so on.🙂 It was a fun time. And now on to the actual topic of my article.


While I was president I tried to interfere into party politics as less as possible. However now that I'm free I'd like to share with you my honest opinion about the political life and institutions of FRoSEA (and Malaysia before).

Let's start with the political institutions in a few words. Well, frankly, they are quite underdeveloped. We didn't go a long way in building extra stuff on the basics that the game provides by force. We have a forum and important proposals in congress cannot pass without discussions there but most congress members very rarely check the forums let alone participate in debates. Some of them didn't even register at the forum. Also we don't have a clear cut procedure for proposing laws and discussing them. It's quite arbitrary. The Ministry of Immigration is also a failure through and through as we have a few congress members who don't care about national security one single bit and just let everyone in. Apart from this the only things I could mention are the Senate and the primaries that have been created by users. The Senate is a nice concept and there is a lot of potential in it. Maybe appointment to the senate should be proposed by the president and voted on by the congress and next to the extra rights it gives on the forum it should function as a honorary title, too. And there are lots of other political institutions and similar things that could be created by the agreement and common will of the users but I wouldn't like to go into that now.

The main focus of this article is party politics. Or to be honest the lack of. The political life of Malaysia had always been dull and this tradition has continued into the union as well. Parties are built more upon friendships or people randomly choosing one than political views, ideals. Could you tell any significant difference between FUP and DAP for example? Hell, even telling what are their political programs and ideals is quite hard. We can know to an extent what they stand for mostly through the opinions of party members but cohesive party platforms are extremely rare. Remember the latest party manifesto of DAP? All a reader can infer from it is that we are for neutrality, for Sol, for transparent government and for increasing the number of users. Good for starters, but not much, right? The presidential campaign speeches were a lot better though, especially in the case of Badlands17. Now, those I can also call political platforms.🙂

Anyhow I think people can more or less infer that both FUP and DAP are center, center-left parties with very similar ideals about the country. Does anybody remember one single contested vote in the congress in the last few months? I don't. The main two parties essentially always agreed on the direction we should follow. We stand for the same policies roughly. Which means that these ideals, policies were dominant in the society and it doesn't even matter much whether DAP gets majority in congress or FUP. Neither could I tell why some eThais joined DAP while others FUP. Maybe them neither. But it's not their fault as there is little to distinguish these two parties. But then shouldn't we simply merge? Or alternatively shouldn't we try to distinguish ourselves more, finding easy to recognize political faces for both parties? Like how Hireshmont Vellos tried for MAP back then? And shouldn't people who are simply in these two parties because they are big stand up and show their political views, create their own parties?

And apart from DAP and FUP there is very little in the way of parties. We have a few not that serious parties representing e-religions. There's nothing wrong with these but they don't really have political goals. Then we have had UPP who tried to offer a more right wing choice to the country. Hats off to them for that but to be honest they always lacked the necessary numbers and most importantly think-tanks. And lately the party leadership has lost most of the control over the party, I think. SIM is also in debt with offering a party platform up until now. It also simply functions as a group of users.

The question I want to ask you is shouldn't we step over being in the same parties with friends, people we got to know and so on? Shouldn't we leave behind being in parties just to be in a group we like more? Shouldn't instead people organize themselves into parties around ideals, preferred policies and programs? We have a few dead parties with 1-2 members, these could be used to represent more diverse political interests and ideals. It doesn't even matter if we break down to more smaller parties. At least interests would be shown better then. And there could always be agreements and coalitions among parties allowing members of non-top 5 parties to run for congress, too. A few topics that would allow for diversification in politics and to kick off discussion:

- Centralist union with "assimilation" vs. a more federal union vs. separatist parties
- Related to this building out a population centre in Thailand vs. not doing it
- Active, regulative monetary policy vs. free monetary market without intervention
- Heavy govt. presence in business with state owned companies vs. only training companies vs. no presence (+ the idea of private contractors mixed in here)
- Different tax plans, policies for taxation
- Active social policy vs. no social programs vs. something inbetween
- Standard, more elitist military vs. a broader less standard military vs. no organized military

And probably there are several more. I'd like to ask people to try to position themselves and their parties in these topics and think about the results.

I'd also like to announce that I intend to run for party president. Probably at DAP, but we'll see. In my next article I'll outline my political platform and how I imagine my party in terms of party structure and such. Thanks for reading this very lengthy article.

Best regards,
Nagyzee