Within Pakatan Rakyat the concept of youth is unsurprisingly expressed in ways as diverse as the parties of the dysfunctional coalition. Clever DAP packages it as irreverence and rebellion, best summed up by their slick but ultimately meaningless “Ubah Rocket Style” video. They also make voting for them look like youthful defiance, which, as we shall discuss later, is simply not true.
PAS promised us a youth revolution in the party two years ago but is still run by a gerontocracy. At last year’s Muktamar its youth division asserted itself by moving a motion against K-pop on the grounds it is “excessive entertainment”. We wonder if they told that to the DAP youth singing along to Ubah Rocket Style?
There is also the fact that PAS in Kelantan issues summonses to young people for, of all things, giving one’s girlfriend a piggy-back. So much for being tolerant of youthful exuberance.
At PKR youth was embodied by the ambitions of Azmin Ali, the prime offender in the damaging civil war in Selangor; Rafizi Ramli, an early victim of that war; and Nurul Izzah Anwar, the dynastic successor to Anwar who has squandered her career prospects by offending anyone and everyone from the police to Muslim scholars.
So when it comes to youth, as with everything else, PKR-DAP-PKR don’t have much in common but they are united by one deceitful construct: The notion that voting for them is somehow the right thing for the young to do, because Pakatan MPs are the outsiders – even underdogs – and therefore, electing them is a virtuous act.
Nothing could be further from the truth. As its seat allocation process proved, there has been no real generational shift within Pakatan. Aging party hacks desperately cling to their seats or use their status to settle disputes, as Lim Kit Siang, 72, proved in Gelang Patah.
The real way to honestly engage youth is to have workable measures to help young people through tertiary education and into the workforce and then to stop pretending they want anything different from all right-minded Malaysians: A stable economy, jobs, healthcare, tolerance, moderation – the basics.
Datuk Seri Najib Razak understands this. That’s why when he is addressing young people he doesn’t gesture to the crowd like a rock star (Anwar’s favourite motivational trick before his adoring fans). Najib articulates exactly the same ideas to an 18-year-old as he would to a 50-year-old, in a serious and easy to understand way.
The real act of youthful defiance at GE13 would be to vote for the party that is reforming itself after 55 years in power; the party that is kicking out old candidates in favour of new ideas; and doesn’t patronise young people along the way. That means a vote for BN.