Is Kit Siang foretelling Pakatan’s end?

By admin-s Last updated Dec 16, 2014

There has always been a grain of truth in BN’s accusations of Pakatan being a marriage of convenience.

Free Malaysia Today

Lim Kit Siang is one of the most respected personalities in Malaysian politics, and so it is no surprise that people listen when he speaks. And what he’s been saying lately should worry anyone putting his hope in Pakatan Rakyat to bring change to Malaysia.

For quite some time now, Kit Siang has been lamenting the lack of unity in the Pakatan coalition, stressing the need for the leaders to get their heads together and stand on common ground. Noting that it had been six months since the last meeting of top Pakatan leadership, Kit Siang is understandably worried that the fallout from the Kajang Move and the Selangor Menteri Besar crisis has taken it’s toll, causing a rift between the leaders of component parties, most notably between PAS’ Hadi Awang and PKR’s Anwar Ibrahim.

The two stood opposed throughout the conflict, as Anwar fought to install a candidate of his choosing while PAS chose not to back PKR’s line, even going as far as to send a list of its own candidates to the Selangor Palace.

Since then, relations between PAS and PKR, and to some extent DAP, have been frosty at best. The PAS presence at Anwar’s Sodomy II trial was miniscule, and elements of the DAP have been suggesting that the coalition move on without PAS. PAS itself has had a major paradigm shift with the empowerment of the ulama faction, which has always lovingly kept the option of cooperation with Umno a hair trigger’s squeeze away. The DAP barely saw hide or hair of PAS at its National Conference this past weekend, unlike the years before.

In fact, a million other issues hang in the balance when it comes to the stability of Pakatan Rakyat. The implementation of hudud, in particular, is a bugbear in relations between PAS and DAP, exacerbated by the ascension of the ulama faction, which will not stand down. There is no common ground here, as the DAP is a secular party that believes in the separation of church and state, as it were. Before, when the Erdogan faction was in power, PAS compromised slightly on hudud, but from here on in, there is no doubt that PAS will implement the law in Kelantan and look to implement it throughout the rest of Malaysia.

But for PAS to achieve that dream, it must cast off DAP, and, to a greater extent, the rest of Pakatan Rakyat.