Bersatu’s centrist tenor a sign of discomfort with PAS

FMT:

Bersatu’s centrist tenor a sign of discomfort with PAS

The emphasis on the need for middle-of-the-road stances by a slew of Bersatu leaders signals the party’s search for a new ruling coalition

From Terence Netto


Verbal signals have emerged from three Bersatu leaders, almost simultaneously, that middle-of-the-road stances by coalition-seeking parties is the way towards forming a new federal
governing coalition.


Bersatu Supreme Council members Hamzah Zainudin, Saifuddin Abdullah and Wan Fayshal Wan Ahmad Kamal have shown a penchant in recent days for holding forth on the wisdom and necessity for centrist-leaning parties to converge to form a new federal coalition to rule the country.

The thrust of their argument is that no single major party can expect to win enough seats to call the shots when they attempt to form a new federal governing coalition.

The major-domo must be a party whose policy stances hew to the centre of the political spectrum in Malaysian politics.

The centre is the ideological basis, according to the Bersatu trio, for the formation of a new federal coalition.

“Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold,” goes a famous line of a WB Yeats’ poem which in the hands of the Bersatu trio of Hamzah, Saifuddin and Wan Fayshal would be rejigged to form a new coalition.

Re-tooled, it could read, “The centre cannot fail to hold; dissenters scatter to the margins.”


By that light, that reshaping could become the ideological glue for a new federal government ruling coalition.

Implicitly, a centrist orientation would have to dispense with parties espousing the radical left and extreme right ideologies.

Hamzah, Saifuddin and Fayshal did not deal with the implication of the centre-seeking thrust of what they were proposing.

In pushing for a middle-of-the-road preference on policy stances, Bersatu will have to leave out their present coalition partner, PAS.


PAS is generally regarded as an extreme right party, though it might contest the designation.

How would it, then, regard what’s being proposed by the Bersatu trio?

With disdain, of course.