Kg Majidee may presage a Pakatan breach in Johor

Kampung Melayu Majidee, located in central Johor Baru on the route to Kota Tinggi, has long been an Umno stronghold that has invariably thrown its support behind the BN candidate to Parliament representing the state capital.

But that BN-favouring pattern has not been reflexive because when their perennial preference for MP and current incumbent, Shahrir Abdul Samad, entered a phase of open rebellion against Umno 25 years ago, the electorate there split their votes between him and his BN challenger in a by-election that Shahrir won in stirring fashion, an indication that Kg Majidee's voters could not be taken for granted.

However, Shahrir (left) did not sustain his iconoclasm for long, drifting in and out of that mood over the years, a square peg in the round hole of Umno conformism, while Kg Majidee's voters, besides that one instance in the 1988 by-election when they did not vote as a bloc, gave only one other example of their capacity to listen to an alternate voice.

This was on Sept 13, 1999, when they turned out in droves to see Wan Azizah Wan Ismail, then the appointed chief of newfangled Parti Keadilan Nasional, precursor of Parti Keadilan Rakyat.

Till today the crowd Azizah drew on that occasion, held in the immediate prelude to GE10 and organised by Parti Rakyat Malaysia, a PKN ally then and soon to be a merged component of the entity called PKR, had just about set a benchmark against which attendances at future ceramah are measured.

The number of police reports - three in all - already lodged earlier this week against the PKR-organised ceramah in Kg Majidee tonight, to be addressed by Opposition Leader Anwar Ibrahim, by itself was not indicative of deep anxiety that the attendance would breach the benchmark that Anwar's wife had set 14 years ago; but that these reports were filed at all suggested there is apprehension in some quarters about what the Anwar ceramah would have on the disposition of Kg Majidee's voters would be at GE13.

The news that Anwar would announce at the ceramah who the PKR candidate for Johor Baru for GE13 would be has sharpened anticipation in advance of the occasion.

Word that the expected candidate, General (Ret) Md Hashim Hussein (centre in photo), is Johor-born and an accomplished former Army chief - he headed our military contingent to the UN-brokered truce in Bosnia in the 1990s, was ambassador to Pakistan, and adviser on chemical weapons warfare protocols to Wisma Putra before joining PKR on March 6 - have combined to make this evening's rally a gauge of Kg Majidee electorate's leanings.

Lackluster leadership

PKR Johor has been lacking in voter-drawing cachet, one obvious reason being due to Umno-BN's vaunted strength in the state, and the other owing to the lackluster leadership of the party's state chief, Chua Jui Meng, whose uncertainty about which seat he is to contest has affected the overall PKR campaign to gain ground in a state endowed with 26 parliamentary seats, the largest number after Sarawak's 31.

PKR was winless in Johor in the political tsunami of March 2008, a mild embarrassment in an otherwise outstanding performance which saw the party garner 31 parliamentary seats.

Efforts to redeem that chastening experience have foundered on the divisive effects on the Johor chapter of PKR stemming from the fight for the deputy presidency of the party between eventual winner Azmin Ali and party upstart Zaid Ibrahim in 2010.

The choice of Chua (right), who had backed Azmin in the contest, as Johor chief was not conducive to the building of ties with PKR's Pakatan Rakyat ally, DAP, in the southern state.

A solution-defying wrangle with DAP over the status of the Gelang Patah parliamentary seat, which Chua was eyeing, ended poorly for him with DAP adviser Lim Kit Siang eventually being handed the seat to contest in what is a DAP drive to bust the Umno-BN monopoly in Johor.

Minus candidate-drawing power, hampered by a tentative campaign, faced with DAP's determination to leverage on a general Chinese voter-aversion for BN - said to be more pronounced in Johor than elsewhere in the country - PKR is looking at prospects that on the whole only a little brighter than things were for the party in the 2008 polls.

Though eleventh-hour inclusions of candidates drawn from the ranks of former military brass should help the PKR cause in Johor, this could come at the cost of lost enthusiasm by its own aspirants who may resent the Johnny-come-lately candidates.

Thus its may all come down to the crowd-drawing power of PKR's chief campaigner Anwar whose wattage on the hustings is now at its most potent.

The appearance of banners in Johor Bahru yesterday which conveyed the usual homoerotic calumnies against him, suggest that his adversaries continue to be bereft of ideas to derail him.

Malay voters in Johor Baru comprise 51 percent of the 100,000-plus electorate, with Chinese (44 percent) and Indians making up the rest.

A benchmark-exceeding crowd in Kg Majidee today would indicate that Johor's Malay voters may at last be prepared to reassert the iconoclasm that its regular preference, Shahrir Samad, was only fleetingly capable of in the past.