Harapan may win GE15, but what are we winning?

COMMENT | "Where’s your messiah now?" – Billy Crystal

Ramesh Rajaratnam in his piece "Cutting off our nose to spite our face?" on the face of it seems to articulate the despondency some Harapan supporters feel at the moment and his rejoinder of the calamities that will befall us if the old devils are voted back in seems like a reasonable call for political pragmatism.

Like most Harapan supporters, he likes to use analogies when it comes to the slow pace of change. A sixty–one year clogged drain, a sixteen month-old-baby clumsily walking and spouting gibberish is useful, I suppose, when it comes to appealing to emotion instead of intellect when justifying policies, positions and backtracking.

But it really does not make sense. Harapan is not some neophyte political entity which suddenly came into power because of broad populist support...