Pejuang to keep fighting after Johor beating, but hesitant for help

 

Pejuang chairperson Dr Mahathir Mohamad said his party will re-calibrate their fight to also focus on bread and butter issues, and not only on corruption, after losing badly in the recent Johor state election.

Pejuang had lost so badly in all the 42 seats they contested in the Johor state election that they were not able to keep any of their deposits.

“We discussed the reasons why we failed in the election and we identified many reasons causing the support for Pejuang to be so little. I do not have to read out the reasons one by one but we have noted them down and will study the reasons.

“(Among the reasons is that) we find there is a sense of unease about the future, especially for Malay people and the country in general, but we focused strongly on getting rid of corruption to the point that we did not stress enough on the issues faced by the rakyat.

“Issues such as unemployment, not having enough to eat, some have been kicked out of their house because they cannot pay the rent and so on, these things were not highlighted as they should have, and this caused the voters to not be attracted to our arguments about corruption,” Mahathir said in a press conference at Yayasan Kepimpinan Perdana in Putrajaya today.

However, when asked if Pejuang would seek a partner to face the next general election together, Mahathir gave a noncommittal answer, saying the proposal will be studied thoroughly first.

“That was among the suggestions given by our members and it will have to be studied in-depth first because we did not work with any parties previously due to the negative effects from the cooperation,” he said, though he did not elaborate further.

He did note that there have also been suggestions by several opposition parties for all opposition to be united, as it is clear that their lack of cooperation is what caused them to lose.

Mahathir stressed that it is not that the opposition does not have enough support as he pointed out BN managed to win two-thirds of the seats in Johor even with only 35 percent of the total vote share in the election.

“It (BN) is a minority government actually but because of the splits among the opposition parties, they have become a majority government with full power (to amend the constitution),” he said. - Mkini