Muhyiddin’s fantasy
A year ago immediately after the concurrent six state elections, I wrote an article about Perikatan Nasional’s chances of becoming an alternative government that peaked and would only further diminish. I called it “peak Perikatan”.
In the article, I made four points about the political scenario after the 6-state elections, namely the talk of a mid-way Sheraton-like takeover would not be credible and realistic anymore; there would be a limit to how much Malay-only anger Perikatan could mobilise; the political stars of Tan Sri Muhyiddin Yassin, Tan Sri Hadi Awang, and Dato’ Seri Azmin Ali would dim; and three-corner fights which had benefited Perikatan were less likely to recur.
While I was of the view that Perikatan as the alternative government was on the wane, I acknowledged in the same writing that PAS remained a strong party. With rejuvenation, and if the party is able to move towards the centre in terms of race and religion, I believe PAS would still be formidable.
The Nenggiri by-election results and the controversies surrounding Muhyiddin’s royal insults reinforced the point that the Bersatu president is still trapped in the past glory of his short-stint premiership and could not move on.
Let us revisit how Bersatu is constituted. The party was established in September 2016 as an amalgamation of all forces from UMNO that were against the then Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Razak, especially Muhyiddin’s camp and those associated with Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad.
Najib sacked Muhyiddin as Deputy Prime Minister on 28 July 2015. As the evidence about the 1MDB scandals emerged and public support for Najib plummeted, some UMNO elements who were against Najib coalesced around Dr Mahathir.
Dr Mahathir and Muhyiddin were never close allies. In the 1995 general election, Mahathir moved Muhyiddin, the then powerful Menteri Besar of Johor, to a federal seat and appointed him Youth and Sports Minister, which Muhyiddin perceived as a junior portfolio and resented his boss deeply.
Despite antipathy towards each other, both of them teamed up to form Bersatu with a strange arrangement: Dr Mahathir as Chairman with executive powers and Muhyiddin as President.
Pakatan Harapan, with Bersatu as its component member, won the 2018 general election. However, after slightly less than two years in power, the Mahathir-Muhyiddin forces split when Muhyiddin launched the Sheraton Move against the government, collaborating with PAS and UMNO to topple Pakatan Harapan, which at the same time left Dr Mahathir partyless.
However, the Sheraton Move was a mathematical exercise that would not stand the test of a general election.
First, a government with three Malay parties, namely Bersatu, UMNO, and PAS, may form the government together but the limited number of Malay-majority constituencies would force them to scramble for seats to contest. In other words, Muhyiddin’s makeshift governing coalition was not sustainable structurally.
Second, to launch the Sheraton Move, Muhyiddin had to kick out Dr Mahathir’s group from Bersatu while accepting Parti Keadilan Rakyat’s renegades led by Azmin. The other group in Bersatu that supported Muhyiddin was the UMNO deserters led by Datuk Seri Hamzah Zainuddin. They were the ones who won on UMNO’s ticket but abandoned their party when UMNO lost power for the first time in history after GE14.
What is the strength of Bersatu today? It is a very disparate and distinctive group brought together by circumstances with little in common. The split between Azmin and Hamzah is imminent.
Just by comparison, despite suffering some defections, Prime Minister Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim held together a core group of leaders from 1998 to 2022 even though he had no access to power and was in jail for a significant part of that period (1998 to 2004, 2015 to 2018).
What held the current Bersatu together was Muhyiddin’s premiership from March 2020 to August 2021, and the subsequent belief that he could make a comeback as Prime Minister.
It was this idea that brought Perikatan Nasional a significant number of votes, with the help of PAS, and helped the coalition win 74 out of the 222 parliamentary seats in GE15.
Today, the idea of having Muhyiddin as Prime Minister is no longer possible. Even PAS has skillfully positioned the party’s rising star and Menteri Besar of Terengganu Datuk Seri Dr Samsuri Mokhtar, who won the Kemaman by-election in 2023, as the next Prime Ministerial candidate.
Yet, Muhyiddin is still dreaming about becoming Prime Minister again. When he continues to harp on the events in November 2022 that led him to question the formal judgment of the Yang di-Pertuan Agong Sultan Abdullah, it is indeed a sad reflection of his ethereal fantasy.
LIEW CHIN TONG is Deputy Minister of Investment, Trade and Industry, Iskandar Puteri MP, Perling state assemblyman and DAP deputy secretary general.