Azmin Ali still under Anwar's shadow

Malaysiakini - Does Azmin have vision to unite Pakatan folk?

Comments by MKINI's readers (just extracts):

ZhuGeLiang: A good leader must be able to unite the party and put all differences aside to fight for a common goal - win the next general election (GE).

Not Azmin Ali, though. Based on his records, I find him to be divisive and is only interested in pursuing his own agendas.

My view is that he will destroy the opposition if he remains in charge. Ironically, despite all the criticisms, PM Najib Abdul Razak is a much better leader than Azmin as Umno is firmly behind him.

I don't see much hope for the opposition in the next GE. Instead of helping Pakatan Harapan, Azmin is causing a lot of damage to DAP with his continuous association with PAS.

Don't Worry Be Happy: To step into Anwar's shoe, Azmin still has a lot of miles to fly and most importantly, needs to have his head 'transplanted' with an angelic brain.

Sorry Azmin, you are simply not ready and unsuitable.

The Analyser: The question should really be - can Azmin's philosophy replace Anwar's philosophy? And the answer is highly unlikely because Azmin has no philosophy nor apparently does PKR.

One could even say that Anwar's philosophy was not too wonderful, but to replace it with nothing is worse.

Azmin might well be aggressive and highly ambitious, but is that what Malaysia needs in a leader?

I would rather have a man who left his hormones at home and able to show some sort of insight into the problems of Malaysia, how to solve them and with some vision for the future.

Azmin's time in Selangor has hardly been a bright light in the Malaysian political scene.

Then over at M2Day, there was a completely different article (to above comments) by Umar Mukhtar who dismissed UMNO, PAS, DAP as jokes and wrote that PKR is the sole party to rescue future Malaysians. It was not a bad article in its entirety (the parts on UMNO, PAS and DAP) but I have enormous reservations, nay, total disagreement on his take on PKR and Azmin.

Now, especially with Azmin as its current de facto head (PKR loves de factos, wakakaka) I believe Umar Mukhtar's assertions on Azmin and PKR would have to be deemed as humongous jokes, for a start.

Then Umar wrote: "This is because PKR is a party of the future Malaysia. That was why it was founded. Not because of Anwar was being persecuted by a megalomaniac, it was just sequential to it. Anwar later hijacked it as his personal political vehicle" is patently incorrect, very very incorrect.

The raison d'etre of PKR or of its predecessor KeADILan has always been the freeing of Anwar Ibrahim from incarceration, full stop.

But I grant that many in the party including Anwar himself (only after he was freed by AAB) picked up the idea of an alternative coalition to get Anwar into the PM's seat without involving UMNO (ie. without Anwar getting back into the leadership echelon of UMNO), but this alternative conception arose very much later, indeed much much later after the formation of the party.

But nonetheless, PKR or KeADILan had in its start been a single-purpose party, namely, to free Anwar from jail.

Azmin's lack of vision and lack of big-picture leadership have been why the party is now floundering the moment Anwar has been incarcerated, and this time virtually-totally out of action for Anwar in the last effective phase of his political career.

Alas, Azmin just doesn't have the big-picture vision to be the leader, one as a future potential PM.

Azmin may be the consummate cunning crafty politician willing to sleep with enemies to get his political aims achieved but he has a weakness, a humongous fatal one.

Azmin is unlike Anwar who keeps a steady eye on the big picture of becoming PM regardless of whether it's DAP, PAS or PKR which provides the main thrust for his elevation into the high seat in Putrajaya. Anwar wouldn't care whether, as a hypothetical example, DAP won 70 seats to PAS's 30 and PKR's 13 to put him into Putrajaya.

But Azmin lacks that vision and graciousness of his former mentor and leader, wanting not only to be PM but also (and this is precisely his fatal weakness which put him at odds with DAP, PAS, Amanah, SNAP, whoever) to be head of the largest component party, namely PKR, in whatever coalition he will be part of.

Hence we witnessed his habits of preemptively seizing seats from his supposed allies (PKR announced it would contest in 40 of Sarawak's state seats, with 15 being non-negotiable to any Pakatan member), sabotaging them (PKR contested in 5 Sarawak state seats already allocated to DAP by Pakatan) in what we would termed as his 'promote PKR and suppress DAP' strategy.

He is so very jealous of DAP that this must have consumed him daily, and if a Pakatan were to be able to send him as putative leader to Putrajaya, he would have wanted the winning composition of Pakatan to be one of, say, PKR having 70 seats, DAP 20, PAS or Amanah 23.

Only UMNO can provide him the ketuanan forum to fulfil his pathetic pitiful piffling petty pendek-ish dwarfish vision, but alas, there are more than a few obstacles for him to becoming President of UMNO, wakakaka, though Mahathir might have some plans for him in this regard.

As a MKINI commentator wrote: Azmin needs to have his head 'transplanted' with an angelic brain because he currently has a nasty, mean-spirited and very ungenerous one, unlike Anwar who strangely enough or perhaps because of his big-picture vision the incarcerated PKR leader did have when he was leading Pakatan Rakyat.