GE15 | Gombak, a highly dense parliamentary constituency where most of its 206,000-plus voters are Malay, is seeing a five-cornered fight this time.
But taking the centre stage at the hot seat is the battle between incumbent Azmin Ali from Perikatan Nasional (PN) and Pakatan Harapan’s Amirudin Shari, the Selangor menteri besar who was once Azmin’s ally in PKR before the latter left Harapan in 2020.
Many have trained their eyes on Gombak to see if Azmin, largely regarded as Amirudin’s mentor in politics, will be able to become Gombak MP for the fourth time, this time without the support of Harapan.
In the past three elections, Azmin rode the anti-establishment wave to victory. But this time, he is part of the establishment that Gombak constituents had voted against, forcing him to change tack.
In 2018, when he won 53 percent of the votes, Azmin campaigned on a more inclusive and pluralistic platform under Harapan.
This time, with Bersatu and PN, he has put on a more conservative image in a bid to win over Malay voters who make up 70 percent of the electorate.
This is evident in his ceramah, where the central theme was his contributions to the Malays and Muslims when he was Selangor menteri besar, including the number of mosques and surau built with state allocations which he approved.
Carrying the same theme, he centres his attacks against DAP- a party which supported him during his four years as menteri besar - in an effort to firefight the ‘pengkhianat’ label hoisted onto him over his role in 2020's Sheraton Move political coup.
One recurring subject in his ceramah was how DAP stalwart and then finance minister Lim Guan Eng had allegedly wanted to “shut down Ekuinas”, a private equity management company set up to help mid-tier bumiputera companies.
“He (Lim) wanted to take the RM2.4 billion revolving fund that Ekuinas had,” Azmin said to a crowd of some 50 voters gathered under a white canopy erected beside Surau Ubudiah in Phase 9 Taman Seri Gombak, which was associated with PAS.
He also claimed that the DAP had undermined other government agencies to set up to support the bumiputera, including Teraju and Felda.
“We left the matter to Guan Eng, (but) he cut the allocation to only 300km,” the Bersatu leader added, blaming Lim for allegedly cutting Putrajaya’s allocation for roads in Felda settlements, which are Malay-majority areas.
“So how can I stay in Harapan (after all these)? How can people accuse me of being a traitor? These are facts. Am I a traitor?” he stressed in the ceramah, riling up some Malay pakcik and makcik who loudly replied "no!".
Instead, he said, the real traitors were PKR president Anwar Ibrahim and his wife Dr Wan Azizah Wan Ismail, who triggered by-elections to allow them to win seats in Port Dickson and Kajang (state seat), thus “betraying the people’s mandate”.
Choosing the right message for different constituents
Electoral data may provide an inkling as to why Azmin is campaigning on this platform. In 2018, the votes against Azmin were split between the BN and PAS candidates.
Assuming all PAS voters now rally behind him, Azmin must find a way to appeal to those who supported Umno in 2018, while at the same time maintaining part of his supporters from GE14.
With most of Gombak constituents being Malay, the common denominator and the simplest way forward is to play identity politics.
But Gombak has a sizeable minority population, with Chinese voters making up 11 percent of voters, and Indian and other ethnicities making up 13 percent.
Deftly catering his message to this segment of voters, the Malay protector narrative is largely absent when Azmin spoke with the Chinese community in Taman Sri Gombak.
There, instead of attacking the DAP, a party which has large appeal among the Chinese, he directed his blows towards Amirudin, who he had himself picked to be his successor as Selangor menteri besar.
Showing there is no love lost, he told the 1,000 people who attended the dinner that his “little brother” Amirudin is actually “spineless” because he could not stand up against the PKR leadership who set him up for a tough fight against Azmin in Gombak.
“You can’t (be like this). If you want to contest, you must be committed, not because you are forced to do it.
“And I am offering myself to you Gombak voters because I want to serve here!” he said.
Amirudin plays the defensive game
Whether Azmin’s overt positioning as a Malay champion will gain him votes in this urban constituency which has had no qualms voting in DAP’s partners in the previous elections is a big question.
Over on the Harapan side, faced with this quandary, Amirudin has decided not to take his chances and go on the defensive.
Countering attacks for allegedly putting Malay interests in danger, Amirudin repeatedly defends Harapan’s position as a multiracial entity that “defends the interest of all communities”.
In a ceramah, the menteri besar told voters if DAP were really out to destroy Islam in the country, Lim, who was the finance minister in the Harapan government, would not have tried to restructure Tabung Haji to save it from financial ruin.
“And if DAP or anyone in the party that we work with really wants to attack Islam, then (Islam in) Selangor would have been the first to be destroyed.
“But the allocation for Islamic activities remains the highest in Selangor every year,” he said.
Selangor has a total of 56 state assemblypersons. The Harapan state government was supported by 45 of them, including 15 from DAP.
The menteri besar also lambasted Azmin for his earlier claim that the Selangor economy had tanked since Amirudin took over.
He told voters during a ceramah in Hulu Kelang that the state had instead recorded economic growth since he took over.
“When I showed all the facts, then he (Azmin) kept quiet. Then he tried to attack me in another way, saying that I am under DAP's control, that the state had decreased its allocation for Islam, and does not defend the Malay and Muslim interests.
“When he could not face reality, he tried playing up sentiments.”
The PKR vice-president also took a swing at Azmin for trying to use the anti-DAP narrative to justify his role in the political coup and reminded voters how Azmin was happy to take DAP’s support to keep him in the menteri besar post.
“Some of them involved in causing the collapse of Pakatan Harapan government only did that because they did not want Anwar to become the prime minister.
“Why? Some of them peddled stories that Anwar is an immoral figure. But the accusation had come back to haunt them.
“But I don’t need to elaborate on this, it is not my style to air people’s dirty laundry or talk about something ‘tak begitu jelas’ (that is not so clear),” Amirudin said.
He was ostensibly referring to a sex video allegedly featuring Azmin, but the authorities could not determine if it was him because the footage was too pixelated.
Common narrative
While Azmin’s bid to play the race card may be a ploy to win over BN supporters, over in the BN camp, its candidate Megat Zulkarnain seems to be fighting back using the same tactics.
An underdog in the race, Megat is confident that he could retain the roughly 26,000 votes BN still managed to scoop up in 2018 when the coalition was washed out in the political tsunami.
“It can’t be worse than that, because there is no general election that is worse for BN (other than 2018),” he told Malaysiakini recently.
Fighting to prove this right In Keramat, where Malay-majority voters there had voted in Harapan in 2018, Megat went to town with a story of how a DAP senator had attempted to get a person's religion to be excluded from his or her MyKad.
“In 2018, we already said that when you give one vote to PKR, it means you give one vote to DAP. But the Malays did not listen to us.
“But then, in the 22 months they were in power, we could see how it turned out. They went to the extent of bringing the issue of ‘Islam’ in our IC (MyKad) to Parliament. Luckily, this did not materialise,” Megat said at a ceramah at Bukit Baru Apartment in Keramat Hujung.
He was referring to DAP senator Nga Hock Cheh’s speech in April 2019, where he asked that Malaysian children born be given a national identity instead of their race to address the issue of racism in Malaysia. The DAP senator had denied that he wanted religion to be excluded from MyKad.
Megat went on to allege that DAP would use the likes of Amirudin and Anwar to get Malay support, and advised Malays “not to be bitten by the same snake twice”.
“Believe me when I say that they will never stop,” he told another small group of voters in AU3.
Who will win?
The Gombak seat may be 70 percent Malay, but its constituents are residents of the cosmopolitan Greater Klang Valley, where racial sentiments may not be as big a sell as in more rural Malay heartlands.
The economic hardships of the two years of Covid-19 lockdown under the PN-led government may also be fresh in the minds of the urban constituents.
To address this, Azmin worked hard to try to douse the notion that PN was a “kerajaan gagal” (failed government), by sharing stories of how PN chairperson Muhyiddin Yassin and himself had managed to steer the country during the economic recession caused by the deadly Covid-19 pandemic.
The Health Ministry’s vaccination programme, for which the government had spent over RM6 billion, was central to his speeches, saying that Muhyiddin’s leadership had saved Malaysians from having a worse outbreak.
“If you want to test a leader, test him during a crisis. If the leader manages to handle the crisis and bring the country out of economic woes, that is the leader who is able to uphold the society and make the country prosperous,” he said at an event in Sungai Kertas transit housing facility, attended by 50 people.
A straw poll by KiniTV in the early parts of the campaign revealed a balanced scale - 12 voters approached, six said they would vote for Azmin and six others for Amirudin.
But yesterday, more than 5,000 people braved the rain to throng the Harapan ceramah at the constituency, far eclipsing the numbers of PN supporters at the coalition’s ceramah at the same venue two days before.
If turnouts at ceramah sessions are anything to go by, the scale may be tipping. - Mkini
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