This was too much to pass up, I just had to dust off the olde soap box…
There was a time when Mergers & Acquisitions (M&A) were the flavor of the month when it came to business expansion plans. As far as Gerakan is concerned, however, merging isn’t some unique flavour that you have to be in the mood for, it is almost pedestrian, it’s vanilla. For most people, vanilla is always okay. Nothing special, but it’ll always do.
Around 2004 Gerakan was pushing a Gerakan-MCA merger, more recently there was cakap of Gerakan-PPP merger, now they’re going for the full monty and proposing that the Barisan Nasional be consolidated from the coalition of the 13+1 willing, to a single party. Hey, if it ain’t broke…
But dissolving the 14 parties and forming a single party called Barisan Nasional… like that cannot la, it kinda gets in the way of the “UMNO dulu kini dan selama-lamanya” agenda. A more likely scenario (not that it is likely, mind you) is that we get a serving of pseudo-equality, with UMNO opening it’s membership to non-Malays (allow me to pre-empt Utusan Melayu’s Awang: “sudah boleh join, mau apa lagi?”) with no ability to secure a position by popular vote on the Supreme Council (though I wouldn’t rule out a couple of appointed stooges being let in).
But it’s a nice day today, so let me swap my jeans of pessimism for khakhi’s of optimism… Godspeed, Gerakan Youth… If this comes to pass, it will be the most significant progressive step in the history of the Barisan Nasional/Parti Perikatan, for it may finally represent the retirement of their shallow, naive, and ultimately doomed-to-failure ideology, historically packaged as the Formula Perikatan.
Ok ok, I’m afk again now, bye bye…
