Malaysia’s opposition coalition must radically change to survive

The second option would be for Anwar Ibrahim to resign as the leader of the opposition. There are two problems to this scenario. Anwar has no intention of resigning. Even if Anwar was to step down for the good of the party, there is no visible heir apparent to take over. This shows a great weakness within PKR itself.

The third option is to form an alliance with UMNO. Such an alliance would bring Pakatan to government once again, be it sharing power. For UMNO, this would mean the party could completely sever ties with PAS and become a more moderate party. There have been talks about this alliance for some time between Anwar and UMNO's president Zahid Hamidi. Although a potentially winning coalition, party members from both sides would be staunchly against this, and most Pakatan supporters would see it as betrayal and rightfully so.

Finally, an 'out of the box' option would be to amalgamate all the member parties within Pakatan into a single party, something like the Democratic Justice Party (DJP). This would create a true multi-racial alternative to the race-based parties of the past. However, egos and differing agendas may make this almost impossible.

Pakatan now has a lot of serious thinking ahead of them.