BN can win next election if I get full support, says Najib

Datuk Seri Najib Razak says Barisan Nasional can still win the next general election if party members remain united and offer him their full support. – The Malaysian Insider filepic, May 17, 2015.Datuk Seri Najib Razak is adamant that the Barisan Nasional (BN) can win the next general election if there is no infighting and there is full support for him, despite one of his predecessor's continuous demand for his resignation.

Najib said his transformation policies over the past six years are beginning to have an impact in people’s lives and if he gets the support he needs to continue them, BN “will succeed”.

“If I get the support that I need to pursue the transformation programmes, we will succeed. If we are united, and stop the infighting, we will succeed.

“If we focus on constructive rather than destructive politics, we will succeed. If we focus on work instead of believing and spreading rumours, spins and half-truths, we will succeed,” he wrote on his blog www.najibrazak.com.

The post was part on a larger FAQ section, which the Umno president and BN chairman, attempted to respond to various issues that had been brought up in public recently, some of them from detractors within Umno.

Former prime minister and Umno president Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamed is waging a campaign to replace Najib, saying that Umno and BN will lose if the latter remains in power.

Dr Mahathir’s frequent criticism of Najib has supposedly opened a rift among Umno grassroots members, though the party’s influential middle-tier leaders at the division level, have strongly backed him to continue.

Mahathir has seized on the 1Malaysia Development Bhd financial scandal, the 1Malaysia People’s Aid and the lavish lifestyle of Najib’s family as reasons for why he has to go.

Writing under the subject “Claims that BN will lose at the next general elections”, Najib appeared to respond to these attacks by highlighting successes under the economic transformation programme.

“We have started to see the fruits of our efforts. Our gross domestic product (GDP) has been growing around 5-6% since I took over and we are well on our way to achieving a developed economy by 2020.”

Some of the milestones which Najib highlighted include:

* achieving the best score in 10 years on Corruption watchdog Transparency International Corruption Perception Index,

* attracting high rates of foreign investment while bringing down the national debt to GDP ratio and the budget deficit,

* reaching an all-time high in the World Economic Forum’s most competitive economy index, overtaking Australia, France, Austria and South Korea and in the World Bank’s ease of doing business index.

* maintaining a favourable investment grade among all three major international credit rating agencies and an international trade surplus.

He also said some of the units in his flagship affordable housing scheme PR1MA have already been completed while 60% of the first phase of the country’s largest infrastructure project, the Mass Rail Transit, was ready.

“The economy opened 1.5 new million jobs in the last five years making our unemployment rate amongst lowest in the world.”

He also implored readers to fairly compare the above successes to the claims of his supposed “failures’ in order to ‘recognise’ how far the country has come”.

“Improvements are happening before our very eyes. But I know that many would of course rather look at the bad and continue to harp on never ending rumours, half-truths and spins.

“They continue to believe that the ‘end is nigh’ and that the opposition will win. These are claims that have been made over and over again in the last five decades and yet we are still here.”

- TMI