Nurul Izzah: Squabbles, failure to ring voters’ bell cost Pakatan
(MM) – Failure to resonate with voters and a perception of disunity contributed to Pakatan Rakyat’s (PR) loss in Election 2013, PKR vice-president Nurul Izzah Anwar told a forum here last night.
Made up of three parties with different ideologies and membership bases ― PKR, PAS and DAP ― PR did not present a unified front to convince Malay voters that it was capable of caring for their interests, Nurul Izzah suggested.
The pact also did not tailor its message in a manner the Malay voters could appreciate.
“You need effective communication. If we keep on using terms that Malays [do not find] relevant to their interests … we will fail, we will not win, and we will not be able to secure their votes,” Nurul Izzah told a forum organised by the PAS Research Centre here.
Nurul Izzah had earlier contrasted PR’s approach towards voters with Barisan Nasional (BN), which she alleged had used racially-tinged language when courting the Malays.
In one example, the Lembah Pantai MP said the pact had championed “means-tested benefits” as an approach towards affirmative action, which entailed grading recipients for eligibility towards federal aid. Although more efficient and effective, she noted this might have been misconstrued by some voters as denying them of their “rights”.
To illustrate her point, Nurul Izzah gave the example of the Republican party in the US, which has consistently garnered votes from the general American public despite not making minorities a priority, unlike their Democrat rivals.
Nurul Izzah’s remark yesterday comes at a time when PR component parties are in an introspective mood, as they undergo post-mortems to ascertain the reason behind the pact’s defeat in the May polls.
Despite PR winning the popular vote at 51.4 per cent over BN’s 48.6 per cent, the country’s first-past-the-post system and alleged malapportionment of constituencies meant the opposition coalition still failed to wrest control of the federal government from BN.
Last night, Nurul Izzah suggested that there might still be distrust among voters towards PR parties’ ability to work with a united front, which had resulted in a split in the Malay vote.
“Actually, more than BN’s racial politics, it was the issue of PR’s unity,” warned Izzah, as she explained that PR may have lost as much as 6 per cent of votes due to the perception.
“The majority of Malaysians support PR … But they feel that PR is not as intact as BN.”
She pointed out that there had been a number of contradicting statements made by PR leaders during the campaign period.
PR parties also failed to compromise fully on the placement of candidates, resulting in at least three-cornered fights against each other in several seats.
According to her, the same problem had also affected BN, which lost votes in Terengganu and Perlis state seats after internal squabbles between its leadership in both states.
Earlier, the Islamist party’s Salahuddin Ayub spoke of the efforts PAS must now take to build on Election 2013.
In the 13th general election, BN fared worse than it did in 2008 and won just 133 seats in the 222-member Parliament, down from the 140 five years ago. This was also short of the 148 it had targeted in its bid to regain the two-thirds majority it lost in 2008.
PR took 89 seats, up seven from the 2008 election but still well short of unseating one of the world’s longest-serving governments.
