Harapan may lose GE15 if it pushes reforms too fast, Saddiq warns

Pakatan Harapan could lose the next election if they were to push everything on their reform agenda at one go, said Youth and Sports Minister Syed Saddiq Syed Abdul Rahman.

Speaking at a conference today, he said the ruling coalition cannot afford to lose sight of its electorate while embarking on efforts to reform the country, claiming that it would spell disaster for the ruling coalition.

He added that if the Harapan government fell, institutions of democracy which Malaysians wished to solidify would falter together with it.

"(You cannot) just be pushing all at one go, and in the end lose all of the support which brought you into the government to begin with.

"There were a lot of discussions about how we should approach race and religion in politics...There's a claim that we should remove race-based policies.

"I call for all of you to think carefully, and despite looking at things from an economic lens, also look from the political lens," he said.

The Bersatu Youth chief was speaking at the launch of a policy paper on conflict of interest by the Center to Combat Cronyism and Corruption (C4) in Kuala Lumpur.

He touched on the matter in response to panellist Edmund Terence Gomez, a professor of political economy at Universiti Malaya, who had earlier criticised Harapan for emulating policies of the previous BN government.

Gomez had said that Harapan had backtracked on its own promise to disallow politicians from holding positions in government-linked companies and to do away with a bumiputera-centric economic agenda.

Syed Saddiq cited the US presidential election in 2016 as an example of consequences of bulldozed reform agendas.

"In the US, when there is a vacuum and there were reforms made very quickly, the pendulum swung from someone as respectable as Barack Obama to someone as unfortunate as Donald Trump.

"If you go too quickly to the point that you lose sight of your electorate and you lose the next election, the institutions of democracy which you would like to cement and solidify, the tradition of democracy now embedded in the heart of Malaysians, can be removed very quickly."

He added that while Harapan always wants to have a strong sense of idealism, the coalition "should never lose sight of the unfortunate realism behind it". - Mkini