Kajang Move: Will it succeed?
The focus of issues will decide the election result. If Pakatan is not careful, they may lose a battle they look set to win.
Selena Tay
With eight days more to go before polling on Sunday, March 23, the battle for Kajang is beginning to take on an air of greater urgency.
A local English newspaper dated March 13, 2014 has reported Umno Youth chief Khairy Jamaluddin calling PKR’s Wan Azizah Wan Ismail ‘a puppet’ as she is merely replacing her husband Anwar Ibrahim in the Kajang by-election.
(Anwar became ineligible to contest due to being convicted of sodomy via a Court of Appeal ruling on March 7.)
Calling Wan Azizah ‘a puppet’ is certainly hitting below the belt. BN leaders have called for a clean election campaign and everyone in BN must live up to that.
Are they going to adhere to what they have requested others to do? Or is the call for a clean election campaign just a publicity stunt to garner votes?
It is best that both sides adhere to an ethical campaign by telling the voters what they can do in terms of service to the people. In that way, people can re-evaluate whom to vote for.
The number of voters in Kajang is approximately 39,000 comprising 49% Malays, 40% Chinese and 10% Indians. As the Malays are the majority, painstaking efforts are being made to woo their vote.
According to this columnist’s PKR friend who had conducted a survey, the Chinese have a preference for PKR regardless of whoever is the candidate while the Malays have a preference for BN, also regardless of whoever is the candidate.
The Indians are evenly divided. This shows that the Chinese are still adamant on supporting Pakatan Rakyat (PR) while the Malays are still firmly with BN.
Thus the battle will now focus on the Malay voters. If BN can obtain 80% of the Malay vote, they can win the battle with only 30% of the Chinese vote. The more Malay votes they obtain, the less Chinese votes they need.
Many Malays are still conditioned to stick to BN and accept BN as a necessary component in their life. They have difficulty accepting Pakatan because to them Pakatan is something new and unfamiliar and therefore they prefer to stick to something that is familiar.
