Pyrrhic victory for BN, says Kit Siang
(Free Malaysia Today) – The Barisan Nasional may have won the Hulu Selangor parliamentary by-election but there is nothing to gloat, says DAP leader Lim Kit Siang.
He said the BN’s 1,725-vote majority is a pyrrhic victory for Prime Minister Najib Tun Razak. “It is so devastatingly costly both in political and monetary terms that the (win) has laid the seeds for the forthcoming defeat of the BN,” he said in his blogsite.
In yesterday’s election, BN managed to reclaim the seat when its candidate P Kamalanathan defeated PKR’s Zaid Ibrahim.
Kamalanathan garnered 24,997 votes while Zaid polled 23,272.
Lim claimed that the BN had spent about RM60 million for various infrastructure projects and easily more than RM40 million for its campaigners.
He added that the expenditure also included the many rent-a-crowd outings for Najib.
(Even before nomination day, the government had rolled out instant projects to the tune of RM338,000 to upgrade drains to overcome floodings and pave roads.)
Lim said after the outpouring of “money politics”, the 1,725-vote majority is actually more a defeat than a victory for Najib and the BN.
With a RM100 million war chest and big guns headed by Najib leading the charge, he said BN thought it would not encounter any problem and would romp home by a landslide.
Even though PKR snatched the Hulu Selangor seat in the 2008 general election, Lim said Umno leaders regarded the win as a fluke.
“That was why Najib talked about the Hulu Selangore seat as being on ‘loan’ to PKR,” he said.
