PERMATANG PASIR BY ELECTION: Of falling durians and revised strategies
By the time the full details of Rohaizat’s disbarment, for allegedly mishandling his client’s money, was confirmed by the Malaysian Bar Council early last week, the BN leadership already knew that damage control through the mass media alone would not work.
Himanshu Bhatt, The Sun Daily
Residents of a predominantly Chinese quarter in the Samagagah township of mainland Penang have found themselves caught unawares not once, but thrice, over the past 10 days. Hordes of campaigning Barisan Nasional (BN) supporters have descended on the area in a series of waves that have raised eyebrows in the otherwise humdrum neighbourhood.
Sitting in an old coffee shop just last weekend, a group of elderly men stopped their lazy chatter, to gaze curiously at BN supporters marching in to shake hands with the very folk they had come to meet just a few days before.
“These political parties come here to shake our hands whenever there is an election,” one of the men was heard telling reporters in Hokkien. “But I don’t remember the same people coming again and again so often like this.”
This is the third by-election in the area since August last year, when the Permatang Pauh parliamentary by-election, won by Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim, was held. This was followed by a by-election on April 1 in the neighbouring state constituency of Penanti.
This time, faced by a daunting and completely unexpected attack on the character and background of its candidate, Rohaizat Othman, the BN has had to adopt a different approach in its campaign.
If anything, the Permatang Pasir campaign has been, for the BN, a story of how the coalition, particularly Umno, has had to instantaneously re-strategise its tactics in the face of a wholly unexpected variable that plopped in its path.
By the time the full details of Rohaizat’s disbarment, for allegedly mishandling his client’s money, was confirmed by the Malaysian Bar Council early last week, the BN leadership already knew that damage control through the mass media alone would not work.
The disbarment issue has meant not just deploying even more hands to generate public visibility, but actual intensified face-to-face interaction. Among other things, the state Umno leadership had to come up with a strategy to have voters intermingle and be familiarised directly with the BN machinery, so as to help overturn any negative perceptions they may have.
“The first time we meet them, there is a sense that they don’t think too much of us, even reject us,” Umno vice-president and state chairman Datuk Seri Zahid Hamidi said last week.
“But when we meet them the second time, we neutralise them. And, thankfully, by the third time, they already respond positively to us.”
Indeed, amid a flurry of allegations and salacious rumours on the lives of both candidates — PAS is represented by its state commissioner Salleh Man — the BN has been the harder hit.
For PAS, it was a case of durian runtuh (falling durian), a Malay maxim for unexpected luck or fortune.
“In any by-election, the character of a candidate is very important,” said PAS’s Kuala Selangor MP and research unit head Dr Dzulkifli Ahmad. “And fate itself has presented this candidate (Rohaizat) to us. It is a God-given thing.”
But while PAS and its Pakatan Rakyat (PR) counterparts rub their hands in glee at the prospect of a by-election against such a controversy-tainted candidate, they have been cautious not to cast excessive attacks on Rohaizat.
“We don’t want to kill Rohaizat,” Dzulkifli said. “If we do, then there will be sympathy for him and resentment towards us. The Malays, they don’t like overkill.”
In fact, the real race that both sides have focussed on is not so much as to who would win the seat, as much as on the majority that PAS would win by.
For the BN, it is now a battle to ensure that the 5,433 votes margin that PAS’s former assemblyman, the late Datuk Mohd Hamdan Abdul Rahman, won in the last general election, is slashed.
For PAS, it is imperative that Permatang Pasir does not become a ground where the BN can boast that the Malay vote is shifting in its favour. Some 72% of Permatang Pasir’s 20,290 registered voters are Malays.
As it is, BN has, deservedly enough, already been making a big deal of its slim defeat to PAS in the Manek Urai by-election last month by a wafer-thin margin of 65 votes. So, despite the gossips and the exposes, the Permatang Pasir by-election is not one to be seen in isolation.
For both sides of the political divide, the numerical outcome of the race would emerge as a critical piece in the overall jigsaw that marks the shifting sands in the political winds of the country.
