As Parliament begins another session, many of the faces defending the government today are the very same people who, just a few months ago, were among its loudest critics.
How does someone stand up one day and passionately argue that a government has failed the country, only to stand in the same Parliament a few weeks later defending it with equal conviction?
Which version was true?
What they said then? Or what they are saying now? Or is the more uncomfortable possibility that truth has simply become secondary to political convenience?
We elect representatives because we believe what they tell us. We vote for their promises. We vote for their ideology. We trust that they will speak for us. Yet many switch to parties they once fiercely opposed and suddenly begin defending every policy they had condemned.
If convictions can change overnight, were they ever convictions at all?
We spend our hard earned tax money to elect them. We send them to Parliament believing they will be our voice. We pay for the salaries they draw, the privileges they enjoy, the offices they occupy, and even the security that keeps us at a distance. And then they stand in the House defending the very policies, the very government, and the very ideas they had passionately asked us to reject just weeks ago.
If this is not a betrayal of the voter’s trust, what is? But then, perhaps the bigger question is not about them.
Perhaps it is about us.
Every election, we tell ourselves that this time things will be different. Yet we continue to reward leaders who abandon principles for power, ideology for opportunity, and promises for political survival. We criticise them for changing sides, but rarely make them pay a political price for doing so.
Politicians behave the way voters permit them to behave.
The day we stop rewarding opportunism, opportunism will stop being profitable. Until then, the real crisis is not that politicians change their stand. It is that citizens have slowly stopped expecting them to have one.
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