Now that the Kajang by-election is over, the Kajang Move seems to have fizzled out. At any rate, it hasn’t turned out the way it was designed to. It doesn’t look like the game-changer it was touted to be.
PKR’s candidate, Wan Azizah Wan Ismail, devoted wife of party supremo Anwar Ibrahim, may have won the by-election, as expected, but by a smaller majority. Even in terms of percentage.
In the 13th general election (GE13), PKR, then fielding Lee Chin Cheh, won by a majority of 6,824; this time around, Azizah managed only 5,379.
To be sure, the voter turnout then was a whopping 88% while this time, it was only 72%, but even by mathematical extrapolation, if all things were equal, Azizah would have had to garner 5,583 to proportionately equal Lee’s majority. She obviously fell short.
That may be splitting hairs, but the signs on the whole are that the Kajang Move is not capturing the people’s imagination. Perhaps it has to do with the fact that since Anwar could be not the candidate any more after he was convicted for Sodomy II by the Court of Appeal, the plans spelt out for the Kajang Move became stillborn. So what happens to those plans now? Rafizi Ramli, the prime mover of the Kajang Move, would no doubt have much to explain.
Does he still advocate that Selangor needs to be protected by a strong leader against the threat by Barisan Nasional (BN) to wrest it from Pakatan Rakyat? With Anwar now deprived of the possibility of becoming state assemblyman as a stepping stone to becoming menteri besar, will the Pakatan state government soon succumb to incessant attacks by BN, especially Umno, with Pakatan assemblymen defecting to the other camp? Will Selangor now cease to be the platform to launch Pakatan to Putrajaya? Will the current menteri besar, Khalid Ibrahim, be now persuaded to do more for Selangor to make it a model city, in order to convince the general electorate that Pakatan is ready for Putrajaya?
Or was the Kajang Move, in the first place, the wrong gambit? Because apart from lowering the esteem of PKR in the eyes of some erstwhile Pakatan Rakyat supporters who broke out in choruses of disapproval and cries of moral outrage, the forced by-election seems to have reinforced the perception that BN is still a strong brand - despite expectations.
How else does one explain why despite the public anger against the ruling BN government for the rise in cost of living, despite the shouts of “kangkung! kangkung!” at polling centres to remind voters of Prime Minister Najib Razak’s infamously insensitive blooper, the coalition was not trounced at the by-election. In fact, it did marginally better.
Was it because the BN candidate was MCA Vice-President Chew Mei Fun whom some voters believed could truly serve them? Or that some voters decided to punish PKR for forcing the by-election to serve what is perceived to be the party’s own interest?
Whatever it was, the MCA seems to have scored a moral victory from the by-election. Initially written off by pundits as a likely big loser, Chew has instead shown some mettle to attract 11,362 votes against Azizah’s tally of 16,741.
Proportion-wise, she has done better than her party colleague Lee Ban Seng who stood at GE13 and obtained 12,747 votes. One couldn’t call it a big loss at all.
(Continued)
(References)
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