Forced Malay-Muslim unity could balkanise Malaysia before it ever stabilises it for good — Phar Kim Beng

Forced Malay-Muslim unity could balkanise Malaysia before it ever stabilises it for good — Phar Kim Beng



Summary

• Hamzah Zainudin, leader of Parti Wawasan Negara, suggests that Malay unity is crucial for national stability.
• However, the article scrutinizes this view, arguing that a forced electoral coalition among Malay-Muslim parties could lead to instability, internal conflicts, and political fragmentation in Malaysia.
• The author emphasizes that Malaysia's stability should transcend ethnicity, advocating for an inclusive, constitutional Islam as a unifying civic doctrine.
• The article warns that consolidating solely around Malay-Muslim unity may provoke broader national and regional divisions, undermining Malaysia's governance and national cohesion.

First Published: Friday, 14 Aug 2026 10:00 AM MYT


AUGUST 14 — Parti Wawasan Negara president Hamzah Zainudin argues that Malay unity is the anchor of national stability.

His proposition deserves scrutiny because the opposite may increasingly be true: a forced Malay-Muslim electoral consolidation involving Barisan Nasional (BN), Perikatan Nasional (PN) and PAS could produce instability before an election, paralysis after it, and ultimately a deeper political balkanisation between different parts of Peninsular Malaysia and the two Borneo states.


The issue is not Malay unity itself. Malays have every right to seek political, economic and social solidarity.


But the more fundamental question is this: can multiethnic Malaysia ever be stabilised by the unity of a single ethnic group, even if such unity were fully achievable? The answer is clearly no. A multiethnic national compact cannot rest on the consolidation of one community alone.


It must rest on a principle that transcends ethnicity altogether. In Malaysia’s case, that principle can only be an inclusive, constitutional Islam — one that is lived as a shared civic ethic rather than an exclusivist political identity.


Only such an inclusive framework can bind Malays, Chinese, Indians, Kadazan-Dusun, Iban and others into a single national imagination.

The problem, therefore, is not unity per se, but what is currently being presented as “unity”: an improvised electoral arrangement among organisations with different constitutions, competing leaderships and unresolved disputes over who actually possesses authority within PN.


That is not necessarily unity. It may merely be an electoral truce designed to harvest — or, more harshly, ransack — the Malay vote under Malaysia’s first-past-the-post system. The distinction is crucial.

First-past-the-post rewards concentrated electoral coordination. If two or three parties appealing substantially to the same Malay electorate avoid contesting against one another, their combined votes can produce disproportionately large seat gains.

The recent Negeri Sembilan experience demonstrated the potency of this strategy.

Analysis after the election showed previously narrow BN victories becoming much larger when BN and PN avoided splitting their respective electoral bases.



Election Commission personnel make final preparations before polling centre opens for the Negeri Sembilan state election at a school in Rantau, August 1, 2026. — Bernama pic



But numbers alone are not constitutional legitimacy, political compatibility or governmental stability.

This is where Hamzah’s argument encounters its central contradiction.

A coalition assembled principally to maximise Malay votes under first-past-the-post may be extremely effective at winning seats while remaining structurally incapable of governing coherently.

Indeed, the warning signs already exist.

PAS president Abdul Hadi Awang has maintained that Bersatu effectively removed itself from PN by attempting to create another coalition.

Yet PN chairman Ahmad Samsuri Mokhtar subsequently maintained that Bersatu remained a PN component. That contradiction goes directly to the question of who possesses authority to interpret PN’s own constitutional arrangements.

Bersatu has since argued that excluding it from Melaka seat negotiations would violate PN’s constitution because it remains a coalition member entitled to participate.

This is not a trivial disagreement.

It means that before the next major electoral arrangement is even concluded, the parties involved are disputing who belongs to the coalition, who can negotiate seats and who possesses the authority to determine membership.

Thus, the supposed Malay-Muslim unity contains the seeds of internecine conflict within itself.

Any claim that the BN-PN-PAS arrangement itself is legally invalid should be made cautiously unless and until a competent court or the relevant regulatory authorities determine that question.

But its internal constitutional legitimacy can certainly be questioned when a constituent party itself alleges that the coalition’s constitution is being violated. That distinction matters.

The political danger is therefore not merely hypothetical illegality. It is institutional ambiguity.

And institutional ambiguity combined with first-past-the-post electoral engineering can become exceptionally dangerous.

Consider what happens before an election.

Who decides which party contests which seat? If PAS negotiates with BN, where does that leave Bersatu if Bersatu remains legally and constitutionally within PN? Can PN make electoral commitments that bind all its components when one component contests the authority under which those commitments were made?

What happens if rival candidates appear?

What happens if competing interpretations of coalition constitutions are taken to court?

What happens if disputes reach the Registrar of Societies?

An electoral machine supposedly created to prevent three-cornered contests could itself generate legal and political contests over who possesses the right to represent that machine.

The deeper danger appears after an election.

Imagine that the arrangement succeeds spectacularly. BN, PAS, PN and associated partners obtain sufficient seats to form governments at state or federal level.

Who then governs?

A first-past-the-post electoral pact can decide who does not contest a constituency.

It cannot automatically decide who becomes prime minister, deputy prime minister, menteri besar, cabinet minister or speaker.

Nor can it resolve fundamental disagreements about economic policy, federalism, Islamic administration, education, appointments, corruption, Sabah and Sarawak, or the distribution of federal resources.

An electoral ceasefire is not a governing programme.

This is why Hamzah’s proposition that Malay unity produces stability has to be reversed.

Forced Malay-Muslim unity can actually manufacture instability by suppressing disagreements during elections only for those disagreements to explode after power has been won.

PAS wants influence commensurate with its electoral strength. BN has its own institutional history and leadership interests.

Bersatu has no obvious reason to surrender its rights quietly if it believes it is being displaced from a coalition it still legally belongs to. Wawasan seeks to become the bridge between competing political centres.

But bridges work only when both banks remain stationary. These banks are moving.

The potential consequence is internecine lawfare: injunctions, constitutional challenges, disputes over coalition decisions, competing claims to political legitimacy and potentially battles over elected representatives and governments.

Malaysia could therefore move from electoral engineering into institutional paralysis.

That would be extraordinarily dangerous in a first-past-the-post system because the same mechanism that exaggerates electoral victory can disguise political fragility.

A coalition might win an impressive parliamentary majority without possessing an equally impressive degree of internal cohesion.

The seats would look stable. The government underneath them might not be.

This is where the argument intersects with the larger danger of balkanisation.

If Malay-Muslim unity increasingly becomes the organising doctrine of Peninsular politics, other Malaysians will logically begin organising themselves defensively.

Political consolidation produces counter-consolidation.

When Malays are repeatedly instructed to vote as Malays and Muslims, Chinese and Indians may increasingly perceive politics through their own communal security. Urban Malaysia can become politically estranged from rural Malaysia.

Northern and east-coast states can harden around one ideological configuration while the west-coast metropolitan belt develops another.

Malaysia would remain territorially intact while becoming psychologically partitioned.

That is political balkanisation.

The consequences for Sabah and Sarawak are even more serious.

The two Borneo states cannot simply be incorporated into a political doctrine created by the competitive dynamics of Peninsular Malay politics.

Sabah and Sarawak contain distinctive ethnic, religious and political configurations.

Their relationship with the Federation is also inseparable from the historical architecture surrounding the formation of Malaysia in 1963 and the continuing political significance of MA63.

If federal power becomes increasingly defined by which coalition can assemble the largest Malay-Muslim electoral bloc in the Peninsula, Sabah and Sarawak have powerful incentives to strengthen their own regional political consolidation.

Peninsular consolidation can therefore generate Borneo consolidation.

The stronger the politics of Malay-Muslim exclusivity becomes in the Peninsula, the stronger the political attraction of Sarawakian and Sabahan autonomy may become across the South China Sea.

That does not automatically mean separatism.

Balkanisation begins much earlier than separation.

It begins when different parts of the same federation cease believing they inhabit the same political imagination.

Kuching begins thinking principally as Kuching rather than Kuala Lumpur.

Kota Kinabalu becomes increasingly suspicious of political formulas manufactured in the Peninsula.

Peninsular parties begin seeing Borneo primarily as the parliamentary numbers necessary to manufacture a federal majority.

Sabah and Sarawak, conversely, begin seeing Peninsular coalitions as competitors from whom greater autonomy must continuously be extracted.

That is centrifugal federalism which Malaysia cannot afford.

Hamzah is therefore correct that Malay political confidence is indispensable to national stability. But confidence should never be confused with enforced political uniformity.

A further question must also be asked more directly: who is the figure capable of uniting all Malays?

And more importantly, what is the substantive content of that proposed Malay unity? If it is merely electoral coordination or elite bargaining, then it is fragile and temporary.

If it is grounded in a deeper civic ethic, then it must be articulated clearly to the nation rather than invoked as a slogan.

Hamzah and others who advance this idea must therefore present not only the call for unity, but its constitutional, ethical and policy content.

Genuine Malay unity allows Malays to disagree.

It permits UMNO Malays, PAS Malays, Bersatu Malays, PKR Malays, Amanah Malays and politically unaffiliated Malays to hold different opinions without treating one another as racial or religious defectors.

A strong Malay community does not require every Malay ballot to travel in the same direction.

Nor does a strong Malaysia require an electoral arrangement whose primary achievement is preventing Malay votes from being divided.

The true test of national stability is what happens the morning after the election.

Can the winners govern together? Can their coalition constitutions withstand scrutiny?

Can disputes be settled without litigation?

Indeed, can political leaders accept institutional restraints?

Can Sabah and Sarawak remain confident that Malaysia belongs equally to them?

Can Chinese and Indians believe that Malay political cooperation is intended to govern with them rather than over them?

Those are the tests that matter.

Malaysia should therefore be extremely cautious about celebrating an improvised BN-PN-PAS electoral arrangement as evidence of Malay unity.

It may indeed be extraordinarily efficient at consolidating votes under first-past-the-post.

But efficiency in winning elections and capacity for governing are completely different things.

If the arrangement rests upon contested coalition authority, unresolved Bersatu claims, competing leadership ambitions and an increasingly exclusivist conception of Malay-Muslim politics, Malaysia could eventually discover that it has engineered a formidable electoral machine incapable of producing a coherent government. That is the ultimate danger.

An alliance created to prevent Malay votes from splitting could split the institutions of government instead.

A project advertised as Malay unity could intensify divisions among Malays themselves.

Who is the person to unite all the motley collection of Malay groups when Bersatu, even MUDA, are against Hadi-led PAS to work with BN, let alone to place PN and BN, who disagree more often than they agree, together!

A strategy intended to stabilise Peninsular politics could therefore encourage Sabah and Sarawak to retreat further into regional political fortresses.

And an electoral formula designed to capture government could leave Malaysia trapped between lawfare, coalition warfare and governmental paralysis.

That is not national stability.

It is an invitation to balkanisation.

Malaysia needs Malay strength, but not forced Malay-Muslim uniformity; electoral cooperation, but not constitutional improvisation.

Indeed, strong governments, but not majorities assembled from incompatible political components. Invariably, what is the nation-building content of the Malay Unity?

Above all, Malaysia needs a federal political compact capable of surviving the day after an election where nation-building, coupled with a strong economic agenda, to ensure the role of Malaysia as a trading country and regional hub in Asean must always be present.

Because winning Malaysia through first-past-the-post arithmetic is one thing.

Keeping Malaysia governable, constitutional and whole is quite another, especially when Malaysia regional, even, global pre-eminence is compromised.

* Phar Kim Beng is a professor of Asean Studies and a director at the Institute of International and Asean Studies, International Islamic University Malaysia.

 

Fear and attacks grip Taybeh, the last all-Christian town in the West Bank

Historic Taybeh, a Palestinian Christian town in the occupied West Bank, targeted by settlers in coordinated attacks.

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A statue of the Virgin Mary in Taybeh, occupied West Bank [Al Jazeera]

By Al Jazeera Staff

Published On 14 Aug 202614 Aug 2026

Taybeh, occupied West Bank – Underneath a painting of Jesus and his disciples, Sandra Basir brought out what she and her husband, Roland, now keep to protect their home: a couple of fire extinguishers.

They keep them because the last time Israeli settlers set fire to a neighbour’s car outside their house, no one else came. “Civil defence – when did they even show up? After everything was already over,” Roland says.

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The couple’s nightly routine in their Palestinian Christian town is now similar to the majority-Muslim rural Palestinian communities besieged by settler attacks and nighttime military raids for years. Sandra checks the doors more than once before bed. They got a dog to stay outside to alert them of any trespassers. Sandra is, by her own description, always half-awake – listening for whoever might be coming for her four small children while they sleep.

Their seven-year-old son has stopped playing outside, Sandra says, and for months, the little boy told his father not to go to work – scared he might not return. “That’s what our life has become,” says Sandra, who was on the verge of tears throughout the conversation. “A child that age should just be playing.”

For more than 20 years, Roland built up a stone quarry and concrete-block factory on the edge of town, investing an estimated $5m in the business. After employing 40 local Palestinians, he has found his life’s work snatched by marauding settlers, both armed adults and some barely teenagers.

In the past three years – and with the situation deteriorating even more severely this past year – he and his workers were frequently chased off by settlers at gunpoint, with his quarry’s heavy-machinery equipment set on fire. The most brazen attack came in March, when Roland says some 30 to 40 settlers stormed the quarry site in a coordinated mass incursion. Videos and photos show them raising Israeli flags over the grounds and performing prayers on the land. Before leaving, they smashed his office, destroyed electrical panels, and pulled cameras from the walls.

Damage after a settler attack on Roland Basir’s quarry in the town of Taybeh in the West Bank [Courtesy of Roland Basir]

Roland documented everything on video, filed complaints with the liaison office, the police, and every institution he could reach. All his efforts to mobilise help to protect his land, however, were for naught. The settlers were back the next day, with their attacks continuing ever since.

Meanwhile, Roland showed Al Jazeera donation pages online for the settlers that he says carried out the attacks. He also alleges that stone taken from his land was registered under a settler’s name and resold.

This past week, he finally stopped trying to continue operations, leaving his stone quarry business all but abandoned.

“They’ve taken the quarry, taken the factory, taken the land,” Roland says. “What’s left for them to take? My children? My house?”

Fire extinguishers that Sandra and Roland bought to extinguish fires they say are lit by Israeli settlers [Al Jazeera]

A once-safe haven now in the crosshairs

A few years ago, nobody in Taybeh thought trouble like this was coming their way.

Madees Khoury, who runs the Taybeh Brewery her family founded in 1994, lived in Taybeh through the second Intifada, the Arab Spring, and every war on Gaza – but none of it ever really touched the quaint town filled with centuries-old churches, well-built homes, and street-corner statues of Mother Mary and Jesus. “Taybeh was always safe, untouched – never, never, never did I imagine it would come to this,” says Madees.

The town is traditionally identified with biblical Ephraim – the place Jesus is said to have withdrawn to before his final journey to Jerusalem – and is the last Palestinian town left in the West Bank whose population is entirely Christian, home now to roughly 1,200 people and to the ruins of the fifth-century Church of St George, one of the oldest Christian sites in the Holy Land.

Things began to change as Israeli settlers, after driving Bedouin and herding communities from areas to the east, increasingly turned their attention to the hills around Taybeh itself, commencing attacks within the town last year. Mayor Suleiman Khourieh estimates roughly seven settler outposts now surround the town – four or five, by his count, sitting directly on Taybeh’s municipal land.

The attacks that followed mirror those taking place across the rural West Bank, with Sandra – who says her mother’s arm was broken by a settler during last year’s olive harvest – and Roland showing Al Jazeera photographs and videos of the frequent settler incursions within the town’s central confines.

Repeatedly, settlers graze cattle, sheep and camels on private agricultural land. Last year, Christian leaders say fires were deliberately set near the church and its adjoining cemetery. A couple of months ago, armed settlers set large fires along the village’s farmlands and prevented firetrucks from reaching them, according to local residents who drove to the scene.

Residents of Taybeh now face routine restrictions on accessing their farmlands and resources, including the now depopulated Ein Samiya spring. The spring supplies all the water to Taybeh Brewery and other Palestinian communities in the area, but settlers have since taken control of it.

Madees Khoury remembers one morning, in February this year, when a group of settlers walked into the centre of town claiming to search for a horse that didn’t exist – while her cousin’s actual horse and its foal, kept in a small structure on her father and uncle’s land for years, stood a few metres away. When she and her family called Israel’s Civil Administration to have the settlers removed, she says the officials who arrived instead walked in alongside them, broke open the door, and helped carry the horses out. “Instead of removing them,” she says, “the officials who came walked alongside the settlers onto my father and uncle’s private property … took the horse and the foal, and walked out.”

The newest outpost, established just last week, sits on the western edge of town, in Area B of the West Bank – nominally under Palestinian civil administration, though security in these hills has long since fallen to whoever is willing to enforce it on the ground.

On his own land in Area B, Mayor Khourieh has watched a settler take over his vineyard and its well over the past month, following the establishment of a settler outpost nearby. Sitting in his office, Khourieh described the settlers cutting his locks, bringing sheep there to graze, at one point pitching a tent by the well and furnishing it with sofas, and even bathing in the water meant for his vines.

According to the mayor, the army eventually removed the settlers’ tent, but the settlers still come back daily to water their flock from Khourieh’s own well. “We still don’t know whether I’m even allowed to go to my own vineyard or not,” says the town mayor inside his office.

Israeli officials have, at least on paper, acknowledged the problem. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said earlier this year that outposts established in Area B should be evacuated. But despite reported pressure from career military officials to remove the outposts over security concerns, enforcement has frequently been blocked amid opposition from officials in Netanyahu’s far-right government. By Peace Now’s latest count, of the approximately 390 illegal outposts and farms across the West Bank, at least 21 sit in Area B.

Al Jazeera has reached out to the Israeli authorities for comment on the attacks on Taybeh, and the accusations that their response has not been sufficient, but has yet to receive a response.

Madees Khoury at her family’s Taybeh Brewery [Al Jazeera]

Hollow protections from the state

Following attacks in the area – including the invasion of a then-empty home of a Taybeh family on August 5 – on August 9, the Israeli army declared Taybeh, along with the neighbouring village of Rammun, a closed military zone.

The order itself has confused almost everyone tasked with living under it. It bars entry to Israelis and foreigners without a specific connection to the village, and the army has offered little clarity on the terms and enforcement. “It’s unclear,” Madees Khoury says. “The whole thing was strange.”

What almost no one in Taybeh believes is that the order will actually keep settlers out. Especially in the past year, such closed military zone orders have been issued in cases where settlers are attacking local Palestinians – only for those orders to be enforced selectively to remove activists attempting to offer protective presence to local Palestinians, while doing little to remove the violent settlers themselves.

Instead, the removal of visitors adds to the town’s growing isolation.

“The decision hasn’t amounted to anything practical,” the mayor says, “because the settler is still exactly where he was.” Father Bashar Fawadleh, priest of Taybeh’s Christ the Redeemer Church, put it more bluntly: “We don’t feel that they’re actually forbidding the settlers from coming to Taybeh.”

According to Roland, the day the military zone closure was announced, settlers broke into his office at the stone quarry and smashed cabinets, equipment, and anything they could reach inside. The following morning, he tried to go back to what remains of his quarry, but settlers confronted him again. He called the police; two and a half hours later, he says, they arrived, but the settlers had already left.

Mayor Suleiman Khourieh looking at a map of the closed military zone around Taybeh [Al Jazeera]

‘The cross we have to carry’

Emigration of Palestinian Christians has been an issue in Taybeh and elsewhere for years, as the Palestinian Christian population has shrunk to about 40,000 in the West Bank, or just more than 1 percent of the entire population. But under the pressures of severe restrictions on land access by Israeli authorities and settlers, movement restrictions, and the threat of unchecked settler attacks, in Taybeh, the quiet of emptiness is being replaced by a quiet borne of fear.

Madees Khoury says people avoid the roads now because no one wants to risk a checkpoint that might swallow four hours of their day, or a stretch of road where a settler’s car might slow down alongside theirs.

Tourism is gone; a well-known hiking trail that begins at the brewery sees almost no visitors any more. Among a wider economic depression and skyrocketing export costs imposed by Israeli authorities, Taybeh Brewery’s revenues are down 80 percent compared with before October 2023, according to Madees Khoury.

Fifteen families have already left Taybeh in the past two years, according to Father Bashar, along with dozens of individuals who left parents behind and moved on alone, mostly to the United States and Europe.

And yet almost no one who spoke to Al Jazeera described leaving as a real option for themselves. “Where is there to go?” asks Roland Basir, reiterating a common refrain heard across the West Bank these days.

“This land is ours,” says Father Bashar. “We cannot leave it easily … we want to resist by staying rooted in this land, to be part of this land, for dignity, for security, for peace, and for justice.”

Mayor Khourieh, whose own vineyard now sits behind a settler’s fence, put it in starker terms. “We are Palestinian Christians,” he says. “We have been in this town since the Lord Christ walked in it. This is our town. We will not leave it. Even if we die, we’ll be buried in it, because it’s holy ground.”

These days, Father Bashar frames the threats to this bastion of the wider Palestinian Christian community in the context of the suffering that Jesus endured. “For me, our cause, our problems, are the cross we have to carry on our shoulders,” he says.

He pauses before offering the line he says he carries into every house he visits after a new attack: “In the midst of this cross, in the hardest time, still we have hope. Inside our hearts, we have to put hope instead of the fear.”

'Can't please everyone,' says Nurul Izzah on resignation criticism

'Can't please everyone,' says Nurul Izzah on resignation criticism

Zarrah Morden
Published: Aug 14, 2026 12:12 PM
Updated: 5:23 PM



Nurul Izzah Anwar, commenting on her decision to step down from PKR’s number two post, referred to herself as the outgoing deputy president and said she could not “please everyone”.

She noted that some viewed her defeat in Permatang Pauh - long regarded as her family’s stronghold - in the 15th general election as unacceptable, while others were unhappy with her victory over incumbent Rafizi Ramli in last year’s PKR polls.

“And for others, it was just unacceptable that I am leaving (the deputy presidency) in 2026.

“You cannot please everyone, but you can only remain true to yourself,” she said in her speech officiating the PKR annual congress at the Melaka International Trade Centre this morning.

After her speech, members of the press attempted to hold a doorstop interview with Izzah, but she declined to answer questions, including those on her decision to step down.

In a Facebook post on Aug 6, Izzah confirmed her intention to relinquish the party’s number two post.

PKR communications director Fahmi Fadzil said the party’s central leadership had received her resignation request earlier that day, but instead granted her temporary leave beginning after the annual congress concludes this weekend.

Later, PKR lawmaker Hassan Abdul Karim told Mingguan Malaysia that Izzah’s decision to step down was allegedly linked to her dissatisfaction with the government’s approach to combating corruption.

Critics had viewed Izzah’s contest for the deputy presidency as a catalyst for internal friction within PKR, as it preceded Rafizi’s resignation as economy minister.

He later left the party to lead Bersama along with another former PKR leader, Nik Nazmi Nik Ahmad.


Tensions within the ranks

The internal disputes have continued, with Wong Chen, who served PKR for 17 years, leaving the party and vacating the Subang parliamentary seat to join Bersama.

Former PKR lawmaker Wong Chen (fifth from left) joins Bersama


He reportedly discovered on May 20 that his parliamentary office had been blocked from the MyKhas portal, which is used, among other things, to manage constituency development allocations.

He publicly protested the move on May 22, and three days later the Finance Ministry issued a letter terminating his chairpersonship of government-owned financing institution Malaysia Debt Ventures, effective May 31.

A week later, Petaling Jaya MP Lee Chean Chung claimed he had also lost access to the MyKhas portal, followed by Ampang MP Rodziah Ismail on Aug 6.

Both Lee and Wong previously claimed that the move could be linked to their political alignment with Rafizi, while Rodziah is also seen as an ally of the former Pandan MP.

 

Trust between Anwar, Zahid at all-time low, says KJ

Trust between Anwar, Zahid at all-time low, says KJ

2 hours ago

Dineskumar Ragu

Former minister says the BN-PN alliance for the Negeri Sembilan polls created a 'massive rupture' between BN and PH.

Former health minister Khairy Jamaluddin said the question now is how long BN, led by Ahmad Zahid Hamidi, will continue to support Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim’s unity government.

PETALING JAYA:

Former Umno Youth chief Khairy Jamaluddin believes that trust between Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim and his deputy Ahmad Zahid Hamidi has hit its lowest point since the formation of the unity government in 2022.

In the latest episode of his Keluar Sekejap podcast, the former health minister said Barisan Nasional’s decision to join forces with Perikatan Nasional for the Negeri Sembilan polls created a “massive rupture” between BN and Pakatan Harapan.

The BN-PN alliance won 25 seats in the state election, while PH won the remaining 11 seats.

“PH will say it was a betrayal. BN will say that, well, we just agreed to work with you at the federal level. It doesn’t mean we are tied with you forever. Whichever way you want to look at it, there was a massive rupture,” said Khairy.

He said the question now was how long BN would continue to support the unity government, and that the timing of the next general election was “heavily dependent” on the coalition.

“I feel the government could survive even if all of BN’s MPs withdrew their support, although it would still be very precarious. And with the rebel MPs from PKR, and some MPs from Sabah interested in joining BN, you start seeing the numbers getting fewer and fewer. Perhaps the cards are really with Zahid,” he said.

Khairy was referring to Wong Chen’s recent resignation as Subang MP and his exit from PKR to join Bersama, which is led by former PKR leaders Rafizi Ramli and Nik Nazmi Nik Ahmad, as well as the presence of PKR’s Ampang and Petaling Jaya MPs Rodziah Ismail and Lee Chean Chung at Bersama’s launch in May.

He was also referring to speculation that independent Kudat MP Verdon Bahanda and his brother, Kota Marudu MP Wetrom Bahanda of Parti Kesejahteraan Demokratik Masyarakat, would join BN.

KJ expects DAP to stay in govt, says some ‘love being ministers’

On a separate matter, Khairy said DAP might choose to stay in the government when some 4,000 delegates vote on Sunday on whether the party will leave the federal unity government before the end of its term.

Khairy said he believed DAP’s delegates wanted the party to stay in Putrajaya so it could demonstrate some progress in the remaining year of the current government’s term and provide stability to the Anwar-led government.

“If it leaves the government, DAP could sell it as a principled move, but they have done the political calculations and internal analysis. They have found that it is better to stay in the government and demonstrate some results during the remaining year.

“They also fear that if they leave the government, it will affect the government’s stability even if they are still in support of Anwar as prime minister,” he said.

He also took aim at DAP leaders who “love being ministers”, saying this would be another reason for the party to stay in government.

“I will be direct. Some have not cared from the start about ministerial positions, but some DAP leaders love being ministers.

“You can tell by how they walk around, how they pose… I mean, it’s so obvious that you just love being ministers. You don’t want to give up the perks of being a minister after three years,” he said.