BN will still fall even if PAS leaves Pakatan, says Mat Sabu
(The Malaysian Insider) – Barisan Nasional will lose Putrajaya at the next general election, with or without the Islamist party in the Pakatan Rakyat coalition, says a top PAS leader. PAS enjoys strong support among rural Malay Muslim voters.
In a warning to his party colleagues not to feel that they were indispensable to PR, PAS deputy president Mohamad Sabu said the public was committed to changing the government.
“The people are committed (changing the government), regardless of PAS. So we in PAS should not be arrogant.
“Without PAS, the people will still change the government,” said Mohamad, better known as Mat Sabu, in a speech at Universiti Malaya in Kuala Lumpur yesterday.
Mat Sabu’s statement comes in the back of infighting between PAS and its PR partners – DAP and PKR – over the former’s insistence on enforcing the Shariah Criminal Code II in Kelantan.
Senior PR leaders have even predicted that the coalition would break up after PAS’s elections next month in which a pro-Umno faction is expected to take over the party’s leadership.
Mat Sabu based his assessment on how PKR managed to increase its support in the Permatang Pauh by-election early this month and the turnout at the #KitaLawan rallies in Kuala Lumpur.
The PKR candidate for Permatang Pauh, Datuk Seri Dr Wan Azizah Wan Ismail, managed to maintain her support level in the Malay-majority parliamentary constituency.
Mat Sabu said Wan Azizah achieved this despite an aggressive campaign by BN and a boycott call from PAS members in Penang.
It was reported that Dr Wan Azizah also claimed that Malay votes for her went up by 4% to 5%, mostly among young voters.
The KitaLawan rallies, meanwhile, managed to get good turnouts even though there was no official support from PAS’s massive voluntary corps, Unit Amal, said Mat Sabu.
He said street protests were now being driven by a third force of civil society leaders, such as Bersih chairperson Maria Chin Abdullah and student activist Adam Adli Abdul Halim.
“This group is getting larger and they are (politically) independent,” said he said at a presentation of a master’s thesis titled “Mohamad Sabu’s struggles in PAS 1978 to 2013” by Mohd Ikhwaniata Taib at UM’s Arts and Social Sciences Faculty.
Mat Sabu said he was disappointed with how certain individuals in PAS were aiding political rival Umno to stay in power when results from the Permatang Pauh and Rompin by-elections showed that the latter was losing support.
