Now Kit Siang foresees elections in Selangor

Taking swipe at PAS motion, veteran DAP leader says Umno has succeeded in breaking up Pakatan

JOHOR BAHRU: All that is left of Pakatan Rakyat are the funeral rites, the DAP’s Lim Kit Siang said today, warning that Selangor might have to face state elections in the wake of PAS deciding to sever ties with the DAP.

Speaking at a ceramah in his constituency of Gelang Patah, the veteran DAP leader said his pessimistic forecast two weeks ago about the breakup of the coalition had appeared to come to pass.

He called the PAS motion adopted earlier today at the party’s general assembly as a victory for Umno strategists and plotters to divide and destroy Pakatan Rakyat by offering PAS a unity government with Umno and Umno’s help in enforcing hudud criminal penalties in Kelantan.

With his characteristic bombast, Lim said the PAS motion had caused Malaysian politics to enter “unchartered waters with immediate consequences” that PAS representatives would now be unable to continue to be part of the Penang state government.

Earlier today, Lim’s son, DAP secretary-general Lim Guan Eng, had also issued a statement that it was politically untenable for PAS representatives to continue in the state and local councils as well as village security committees in the wake of the general assembly motion.

Continuing in his doomsday vein, Kit Siang said that if the worst came to the worst, elections might have to be called in Selangor, where the state government is also led by the Pakatan Rakyat coalition.

PKR leads the coalition government with 14 seats, while the DAP and PAS have 15 seats each in the 56-seat assembly. The opposition Barisan Nasional has 12 seats. Without PAS, a coalition government comprising PKR and DAP would command only 29 seats leading to either a hung assembly or the fall of the state government.

Kit Siang said that Umno president Najib Razak had “succeeded in seeing the destruction of Pakatan Rakyat” but warned PAS that Najib would not deliver the parliamentary approval needed for the PAS move for federal constitutional changes to allow hudud in Kelantan.

Lim’s remarks have come against the backdrop of the DAP’s consistent rejection of hudud as being unsuitable for Malaysia’s multi-religious society and against the secular nature of the federal constitution.

Relations between PAS and the other Pakatan Rakyat partners soured last year when Anwar Ibrahim attempted to oust his party vice-president Khalid Ibrahim as Selangor Menteri Besar. Khalid received the support of PAS president Abdul Hadi Awang, who was re-elected this week as party leader with a campaign backed by the party’s religious clerics and lambasting his critics as being too friendly with DAP and PKR.

Since then Lim has floated the idea of a new political coalition, on the theme of “Save Malaysia”, comprising secular-minded liberal politicians from both Barisan Nasional and Pakatan Rakyat and tried to appeal to MPs from Sabah and Sarawak.