Tian Chua must prove he’s truly Azmin-less, says analyst

 

PKR vice-president Tian Chua, who is not seeking re-election, says he will defend his post as Batu division chief. (Bernama pic)

PETALING JAYA: Tian Chua still has a future in PKR, as long as he can prove to the party leadership and members that he has cut all ties with former deputy president Azmin Ali, says an analyst.

Ahmad Fauzi Abdul Hamid of Universiti Sains Malaysia said the party’s rank and file should be willing to accept him back into the fold if he showed enough remorse. The onus was on Tian Chua, said Fauzi.

Tian Chua announced last week he was not seeking re-election as party vice-president. He had been viewed as being a close ally of Azmin, who led a group of PKR members out of the party, eventually joining Bersatu.

Fauzi said that should Tian Chua remain with the party, he would eventually be “immortalised” as one of the party’s pioneers, having been one of its vice-presidents and active members since its formation in 1999.

“Although once associated with them (Azmin’s faction), he could argue that the fact that he has stayed put in the party, unlike Azmin and Co., is evidence of his loyalty to the larger cause of ‘Reformasi’.

“We have a parallel here in Abdullah Ahmad Badawi, who sided with Tengku Razaleigh Hamzah’s Team B in the 1987 Umno elections, but never crossed over to Semangat 46.

“Abdullah was in the political wilderness for a good four years before being accepted back by the Umno mainstream and becoming foreign minister. Then in 2003, he became the fifth prime minister,” he told FMT.

Tian Chua said he would not be defending his vice-president’s post to “cool the temperatures” in the party brought by the race for positions in the party polls in May.

However, he would defend the post of Batu PKR division chief and “most likely” would contest the Batu parliamentary seat, which he won in the 2008 and 2013 general elections.

But Universiti Malaya analyst Awang Azman Pawi believed that Tian Chua was opting out of the race for the vice-president’s post as there were already two “teams” shaping up to clash in the party polls.

He said Tian Chua was in neither of these two groups.

“Without Azmin, it would be difficult for Tian Chua to win in PKR. Of course, internally, PKR would still be critical towards Tian Chua, unless he can do something like being more outspoken in defending the party’s leadership from external criticism. This can cause PKR supporters to accept him again,” he told FMT.

He added that PKR would not be on the losing end if it did not field Tian Chua as a candidate in GE15. He believed the party had matured since the Sheraton Move and that there were other candidates who were qualified to run for election.

In the wake of the fall of the Pakatan Harapan government in 2020, Tian Chua was hit with bottles, blows and heckles from an angry crowd of supporters as he left a PKR top leadership meeting on March 1.

The political upheaval saw Azmin and Zuraida Kamaruddin sacked from PKR, while Saifuddin Abdullah, Baru Bian, Kamaruddin Jaffar, Mansor Othman, Rashid Hasnon, Edmund Santhara Kumar, Ali Biju, Willie Mongin and Jonathan Yasin left the party. - FMT