Sibu vote shows difficulties for BN, Pakatan
The lack of appeal to rural communities will hamper PR’s quest to capture Sarawak and replace long-serving Sarawak Chief Minister Tan Sri Abdul Taib Mahmud in state administrative capital, Petrajaya.
The Malaysian Insider
DAP’s Sibu win does not mean Pakatan Rakyat can soon win Putrajaya or Petrajaya, but it also shows that Barisan Nasional’s use of the chequebook will no longer impress disgruntled voters.
Wong Ho Leng’s slim 398 vote majority win revealed DAP’s smart use of issues and disenchantment among the Chinese and Christians, which the Najib administration could not solve simply with grants and promises of better times if the Barisan Nasional (BN) candidate gets elected.
But it also illustrated that DAP and Pakatan Rakyat’s (PR) appeal did not go beyond those communities to the key Melanau/Iban demographic, who stuck to BN and some of whom called DAP ally, PKR, troublemakers.
Just like in the Malay peninsula, PR’s outreach to the dominant communities was only limited to urban areas, and not rural areas which have more Parliamentary and state seats.
“We didn’t get the Iban vote, it’s very close then,” a senior DAP leader told The Malaysian Insider in the tense hours leading to the announcement of official results for the Sibu by-election.
The lack of appeal to rural communities will hamper PR’s quest to capture Sarawak and replace long-serving Sarawak Chief Minister Tan Sri Abdul Taib Mahmud in state administrative capital, Petrajaya.
The biggest upset was for BN, which stuck to its playbook of development politics by wielding its chequebook to solve issues that had festered under five-term Sibu MP, the late Datuk Robert Lau Hoi Chew, similar to Hulu Selangor which had a laundry list of issues unresolved by four-term MP Datuk G. Palanivel.
Unlike last month’s Hulu Selangor parliamentary by-election which it won narrowly, BN lost Sibu and dented the image of Sabah and Sarawak being its “fixed deposit” in general elections. Both states provided 54 of the 137 seats won by BN in Election 2008, in its worst-ever electoral outing.
