COMMENT The double BN win in the Batu Sapi and Galas by-elections has raised the possibility that the 13th General Election and the next Sarawak state election will be held simultaneously.

Constitutionally, the 13th GE is not due until 2013 but Prime Minister Najib Razak would want to hold it much earlier - next year in all likelihood - for as with all newly-minted PMs, he requires his own mandate to introduce changes. Sarawak has to go to the polls by July next year at the latest.

NONE Pundits are fingering April as the most likely month because Chief Minister Taib Mahmud is the sort of man who would want to celebrate his 30th year in office - due on March 26, 2011 - before going to the polls.

Anniversaries denoting longevity – and by implication, invincibility – are significant to political grandees.

After their unexpected loss in the Sibu parliamentary by-election last May, BN has learned that spreading a funds strapped opposition thin is better than jousting with them in single contest.

Holding the 13th GE and the Sarawak state polls simultaneously confers on BN a gamut of advantages their superior machinery, countrywide reach and extensive campaign chest privilege them vis-à-vis the opposition.

The Ku Li factor

 

Although a double triumph for the BN which helps to even an otherwise lopsided overall by-election score against the opposition, the BN victories in Batu Sapi and Galas are riddled with ambiguities.

BN Linda Tsen’s majority of over 6,000 in Batu Sapi would be underwhelming if seen against the background of the presence of 5,000 ‘illegals’ with MyKads and 1,615 postal voters.

NONE ‘Illegals’ with MyKads have been a suppurating wound in the Sabah body politic since the mid-1990s when they were smuggled in from surrounding countries and given the vote to enable Umno to dethrone Parti Bersatu Sabah (PBS).

The myriad problems Sabah faces become less insoluble the minute the ‘illegals’ issue is resolved. This is likelier to happen if the opposition takes power than if BN continues to hold the reins.

The BN win in Galas, reversing the unexpected defeat suffered at the March 2008 general election, is almost certainly due to the return of the Chinese vote to Umno as a courtesy to Tengku Razaleigh Hamzah, who chaired the BN campaign and chose the candidate.

It would be unwise to infer that because the Chinese voters of Galas have just now returned to BN, their kin in the rest of the peninsula would do the same.

NONE Razaleigh is of course an Umno leader of singular attraction to the Chinese because he is viewed as business friendly and as harkening back to a past era of comity and cooperation between Malay political leaders and the Chinese business community.

   

But a vote for Razaleigh in Galas does not tantamount to an endorsement of Najib at the national level. On the contrary, it is an assist for a hypothetical Razaleigh bid for a government of national unity should Anwar Ibrahim wind up in jail as a result of Sodomy II.

In that event, popular repugnance to the jailing would see legislators across the spectrum of political parties in Parliament rallying round Razaleigh to back an interim government of national unity.

This government would rule in the interregnum between confirmation that Umno-BN has been consigned by the electorate to a period on the opposition benches and the start of a Pakatan Rakyat-led era of governance in Malaysia.

Restoration not an option

        

But once in the saddle, Razaleigh may have ideas other than national political, economic and judicial recuperation – like trying for a restoration of an Umno that predates the Dr Mahathir Mohamad era.

NONE That would be a mistake, to equal the one he made when he dissolved Semangat 46 in 1996, just two years before Umno entered into a period of ructions that has not concluded till today.

Had Razaleigh tarried, he would have been PM by the 10th general election of November 1999 as head of a coalition of all those opposed to the way Anwar was traduced and tormented in late 1998.

The ethos that once animated Umno has withered and waned and the corruption that has warped the party is endemic and systemic. To rebuild you have first to destroy. Restoration is not an option.

Accordingly, the BN wins in Batu Sapi and Galas are victories without drum rolls, triumphs without a meaningful mandate.

Instead, they are riddled with the ambiguities peculiar to situations where so much rides on the fate and disposition of individuals with the power to bend systems to their will.

It is precisely this malady to our system that the vote in the GE13 should resolve to cure by insulating it against individual-dictated derangement.

 

TERENCE NETTO has been a journalist for close on four decades. He likes the occupation because it puts him in contact with the eminent without being under the necessity to admire them.