Dr M: PPBM not like failed Umno splinters

The ex-PM says his party will get support because voters won't forgive a prime minister allegedly implicated in scandals that are too serious to ignore.

VIDEO INSIDE

PUTRAJAYA: Former prime minister Mahathir Mohamad has rejected a think tank’s opinion that PPBM, like Umno splinters before it, may not survive in the long term, especially if Pakatan Harapan fails to unseat Barisan Nasional in the coming general election.

Speaking to FMT, the PPBM and Pakatan chairman said the opposition alliance had a credible chance of defeating BN because, he claimed, the ruling coalition is led by someone implicated in scandals that are “too serious” for voters to ignore and forgive.

Referring to the failure of earlier attempts to unseat Umno by parties that had splintered from it, he said the issues of those times were “not so serious that the people would want to leave Umno or stop supporting it”.

“This time the issues are very serious. The prime minister is accused of having billions of ringgit in his accounts,” he told FMT in an interview at his Perdana Leadership Foundation.

The 92-year-old, who was prime minister and Umno president for 22 years before retiring in 2003, quit the party and formed PPBM in 2015 with the intention of “saving the country” by ousting Prime Minister Najib Razak’s government.

In the hope of making a success of the mission, PPBM joined Pakatan Harapan last March and Mahathir was named the coalition’s chairman on July 13.

Wan Saiful Wan Jan, who heads the Institute for Democracy and Economic Affairs, has questioned whether PPBM would survive for long.

In an analysis that FMT published this week, Wan Saiful said the party’s future depended to a large extent on whether it would make headway in the 14th general election. He appeared to have doubts that it would, saying there was a likelihood that it would end up like the Independence of Malaya Party and Semangat 46, which dissolved in 1953 and 1996 respectively.

He acknowledged that PAS and PKR, also splinters from Umno, were still thriving and speculated that this could be because they mobilised civic groups to support their agenda.

However, he added, PPBM was more similar to the dissolved parties in that it was “formed directly by Umno leaders and their followers immediately after they left the party”. He also noted that parties like Semangat 46 did not “sufficiently widen their bases to include more people from outside of the traditional Umno circle.”

-FMT