PH needs a drastic makeover to avert defeat in GE16

 Pakatan Harapan, particularly PKR, needs to make radical alterations to its leadership and tenor to prevent defeat by the forces of Malay identity politics.

From Terence Netto

The forces of Malay identity politics which carried Barisan Nasional-Umno and its erstwhile allies — Perikatan Nasional, PAS, and Parti Wawasan Negara — to victory in the Johor and Negeri Sembilan state polls are ascendant.

But it is a rise that is not irresistible.

Though the surge in Malay identity politics is shaping to deal Pakatan Harapan (PH) a third successive defeat in fast approaching polls in Melaka, PH are not without creative responses to avert what looks like inevitable.

This would require drastic changes to the current leadership and thinking in PH.

No less than coalition supremo Anwar Ibrahim should take the initiative in making the change.

His abject appeasement of Umno has failed and his unconscionable tardiness in implementing PH’s long-gestating agenda of political and economic reform have proven costly.

He bears the principal blame for the PH component parties’ anaemic performances in the Sabah, Johor and Negri Sembilan polls.

He can atone for his stupefying mistakes by doing what he belatedly did towards the closing stages of the PH campaign in the Negri polls: apologise, like he did to Indian voters, for his errors and commence a radical makeover.

This radical makeover should entail an Anwar embrace of Rafizi Ramli, his longtime lieutenant in PKR whose defeat in party polls in May 2025 led to the departure — still piecemeal and not yet fully enacted — of the former deputy president’s sizeable retinue within the party.

If Anwar and his archnemesis Dr Mahathr Mohammed could embrace and collaborate in the lead-up to the general election of 2018, a move by PH necessitated by the urgency to remove Prime Minister Najib Razak over the 1MBD imbroglio, an embrace of Rafizi by Anwar is not unimaginable.

Not for nothing is politics the art of the possible.

The embrace is a must for stopping the bandwagon of Malay identity politics which is the most retrogressive factor ever to have emerged in Malaysian politics.

Not even the disclosure, in the midst of the Negri polls campaign, of the billion-ringgit shenanigans in Tabung Haji, the latest in a series of mega-financial misdeeds by Umno stewards, could induce a pause in the Malay identity bandwagon.

It rolled on nevertheless at the Negeri polls to bring Umno-BN and collaborators PAS and Wawasan to a victory that was stupefying to contemplate.

It was a display of sleepwalking by its energisers that ought to compel Anwar to expiate for his mistakes by embracing Rafizi.

If it comes to that, Rafizi should welcome the gesture because only the radicalism of such a move would give fresh momentum to PH, enough to jolt voters to see that the coalition of reform is still capable of seizing the initiative that the longtime standard bearers of reform are capable of.

Rafizi ought to welcome Anwar’s gesture with requisite humility and resist the temptation of triumphalism.

Elsewhere, within the PH conglomerate, Amanah’s lacklustre Mohamad Sabu should step aside for his deputy Mujahid Yusof Rawa to spur his party’s preparations for GE16.

If given way to, Mujahid should immediately begin to substantively assert that the Islam of Amanah is different to PAS’s version.

And from there he could build the ideological scaffolding on which to erect a version of Islam that borrows from Rached Ghannouchi, the renowned Tunisian Islamist intellectual who in May 2016 announced that his movement, Ennahdha, did not regard political Islam so much as its welfare and justice imperatives as the goal of its struggle.

The third component of the PH edifice, DAP, could help the momentum of the conglomerate’s makeover by accepting secretary-general Loke Siew Fook’s resignation as Negeri Sembilan chief of the party.

Loke should allow Gobind Singh Deo and Syahredzan Johan to play more substantial roles in the presentation of DAP’s positions on national issues.

Rafizi, Mujahid, Gobind and Syahredzan should be seen as prompting Anwar to restart the task of implementing the reformasi programme.

The programme should be implemented with all deliberate speed in the one-and-a-half years to GE16 which must be held by February 2028.

Meanwhile, nothing should be done to show Umno that PH harbours hard feelings about the way the party has treated PH in the Johor and Negeri Sembilan polls.

PH should stick to the spirit of the Madani construct it forged with Umno at the federal government level and the collaboration PH rendered the Umno-led state governments in Perak and Pahang.

PH should take its drift from the saying, “The dogs bark but the caravan moves on.” - FMT

Terence Netto is a senior journalist and an FMT reader.

The views expressed are those of the writer and do not necessarily reflect those of MMKtT.