COMMENT | Every time I hear political operatives say that Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim and Pakatan Harapan should not pander to “Malay conservatives” or drift further to the right, I have no idea what these people are talking about.

First of all, the only left-wing and progressive parties on the board at the moment are PSM and Muda, and nobody is interested in voting for them. All the more reason for PSM and Muda to carry on with their efforts. People will come around, hopefully before it is too late.

Look, someone like activist Kua Kia Soong is routinely demonised by the Harapan base when what he advocates using the language of the left are really centrist ideas when it comes to the Malaysian context.

However, the so-called progressive Harapan base rejects those ideas and instead focuses on pragmatism (which is a necessary concept) but in the Malaysian experience means appeasement, and then wonder why our democratic spaces are shrinking with each successive roll of the dice.

Harapan is the definition of...