Pak Lah’s quiet revenge

By Oon Yeoh, The Edge

In the aftermath of the March 8 general election, Khairy Jamaluddin was blamed for many of the mistakes made by outgoing Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi.

Many wrote him off for dead, politically, after Pak Lah agreed to step down, in the face of intense pressure from within Umno, to make way for his deputy Najib Razak to helm the party.

This was not surprising. After all, Khairy was supposed to have risen as high as he did riding on Pak Lah’s coattails. His powers and influence were purely derivative, political observers say.

Yesterday, Khairy proved his detractors wrong and stepped out of his father-in-law’s shadows by clinching the Umno Youth chief post.

In doing so, not only did Khairy manage to keep his political career alive – if he had lost he would have been consigned to the garbage bin of politics – he also gave his one-time benefactor, Pak Lah, some quiet satisfaction.

In the run-up to the Umno Youth polls, Pak Lah’s nemesis, former Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad, had issued some thinly veiled threats, hinting strongly to Najib that he could make life difficult for him if things didn’t go his way.   

Among other things, he griped that Najib had not performed up to expectations and warned him to appoint only clean people to his Cabinet.

Khairy was warned by the Umno Disciplinary Board for engaging in money politics while runners-up Khir Toyo was investigated for the same thing. Mukhriz Mahathir, it appeared, was clean as a whistle but it was he who came out last in the Umno Youth election.

Revenge, they say, is a dish best served cold. And nothing could be colder for Dr M than the election result itself.

And now that Khairy is the Umno Youth chief, in all likelihood, he will be made a full minister much to Dr M’s chagrin. Perhaps Najib can placate the former premier by making Mukhriz a full minister too.

But that would only set the stage for a political rivalry that will cause Umno to be mired in political infighting for years to come. Nothing can be as debilitating as having two alpha male politicians trying to outdo each other and fighting a proxy battle on behalf of two former premiers.

And that scenario could be made worse depending on the outcome of the deputy president’s race later today. The battle between Muhyiddin Yasin and Muhammad Muhammad Taib can rightly be seen as yet another proxy fight between Dr M and Pak Lah, respectively. Imagine how incensed the former would be if the unlikely happens and Mat Taib wins.

But those are not the only problems that lie ahead for Najib. Umno Youth is badly fractured. In a three-way fight, where the margin of victory is small, what you have is a situation where the winner is someone rejected by a majority of the voters. (Khairy won 304 out of the 788 votes cast).

As political analyst Wong Chin Huat points out, we will see a legitimacy crisis as Khairy has no strong command over the Youth wing.

Further hampering Khairy is his own Jekyll & Hyde political persona, alternating between playing the moderate progressive who can steer Umno back to the middle ground and the Malay ultra who will defend race and religion at all cost.

Ironically, this strategic vacillation between moderate and ultra was something Dr M used to great effect throughout his career. But Khairy is no Dr M. He won’t be able to pull it off – either convincingly or effectively. He will, however, be a regular thorn in the side of MCA, Gerakan and MIC.

In his opening speech at the Umno General Assembly, Najib called for the delegates to vote in a steady team that can help him rebuild the party. On Day One, they gave him the candidate that would probably give him the most headaches.