Why Bersatu holds out for opposition unity

Why Bersatu holds out for opposition unity



From Terence Netto


You can measure the desperation of Bersatu by its president’s and other key party officials’ clamour for opposition unity to face Barisan Nasional (BN) at the fast-approaching GE15.

Opposition unity as envisaged by Bersatu chief Muhyiddin Yassin means the Bersatu-led Perikatan Nasional having some kind of electoral pact with Pakatan Harapan.


This has been an impossibility because PH’s biggest component, DAP, had already made it clear some time ago that they are opposed to working with “traitors” in facing GE15.

“Traitors” is the epithet for engineers of the Sheraton Move that ended the PH government in late February 2020 after 22 months in federal power.

The principal architects of the Sheraton Move were the movers and shakers of Bersatu, mainly Muhyiddin and company, and a coterie of PKR quislings, led by Azmin Ali.

The entire bunch is viewed with loathing by DAP and, in the case of PKR, with something amounting to hatred by its deputy president, Rafizi Ramli, and his supporters within the
party.

PKR supremo Anwar Ibrahim is equivocal while beaten candidate for deputy president Saifuddin Nasution is in favour of some sort of arrangement which is somewhat the
position of some key players within PH’s smallest component, Amanah.

This equivocation is what gives Bersatu hope that an electoral arrangement can be worked out though PN component PAS had made known their aversion to any collaboration with DAP and Amanah.

With such ambiguities clouding the horizon, Bersatu’s holding out for opposition unity reflects desperation to see that some such arrangement be worked out.

Media reports that six of the 15 Umno MPs who defected from the mother party to Bersatu are disinclined to defend their seats only serve to underscore the picture of a Bersatu
gloomy about its prospects going into GE15.

The stance of the newly formed Gerakan Tanah Air coalition, cobbled together by Dr Mahathir Mohamad, that they are not interested to work with PN has made the latter’s isolation even worse.

Mahathir has fingered Muhyiddin’s desire to be prime minister and PN’s goal of staying on in government after GE15 as the reasons for the group’s overtures towards opposition unity.

In other words, Muhyiddin and PN are plumping for power and its perquisites.

This is a true reading of their motivation. It would be self-deluding for elements in PH favouring some electoral arrangement with PN to ignore what’s prompting the overtures from Bersatu.

It’s not a question of once bitten twice shy for PH. It’s more an interpretation of what Muhyiddin and company have done since taking over the federal government from March
1, 2020.

Bersatu’s governance has been a series of unabashed pay-offs for political operatives whose support could be purchased with positions, perquisites and cover-ups.

PH, in 22 months in the saddle at Putrajaya, did not really implement their wide-ranging agenda of reform.

But to say they failed would be to slight such extenuating factors like they being headed by a prime minister who was not only ambivalent about the reform agenda but sometimes
even duplicitous about the idea of his former adversaries being in the saddle with him.

In hindsight, it was a situation that was doomed to fail.

If there is one lesson to be learned from the upheavals of our recent political history – Mahathir’s ambivalence-cum-duplicity, the Sheraton Move, Anwar Ibrahim’s confidence he had the numbers – it is failure to recognise that rank opportunism would not get you anywhere.

PH must not regress to its recent past, disguised as its non-existent future.



Terence Netto is a senior journalist and an FMT reader.