COMMENT Revving up pressure by the DAP on Selangor Menteri Besar Azmin Ali to drop PAS from the ruling coalition will undermine governance of the state by the opposition in the near term more than it will gain long term ascendancy for it.

The problems caused by the erratic top leadership of PAS are not susceptible to surgical solutions; these will have to await the verdict of the electorate before the overall picture congeals to allow for lasting solutions to crop up as the situation clarifies.

Meanwhile, DAP must cut Azmi slack for the PKR deputy president owes his appointment as MB to PAS support for him.

That would not have been the case had PKR pushed for Azmin rather than party president Dr Wan Azizah Ismail to be Selangor MB when then-incumbent Khalid Ibrahim was last year adjudged by the party to be a liability in dire need of jettisoning.

Khalid fought a long rearguard action to prevent his inevitable replacement, causing severe intramural strains in the opposition coalition, Pakatan Rakyat, which portended its ultimate collapse in June this year.

The lesson of the Pakatan Rakyat crisis throughout last year was stark - don’t load the cart with more than the donkey can bear.

Yielding to frustration caused by the error-prone gyrations of PAS president Abdul Hadi Awang would see the DAP weighing down Azmin with demands that he cannot and should not accede to.

The resultant tensions and sniping within opposition ranks will reprise the internecine feuding that undermined public confidence in opposition governance most of last year during the Khalid Ibrahim replacement saga until Azmin was appointed was appointed MB in September, whereupon he proceeded to restore confidence in Pakatan Rakyat governance with populist activism that recalled the early days Dr Mahathir Mohamad’s premiership of the country at the onset of the 1980s.

It must be said that Azmin does not take the requisite gratitude to PAS to extents that are servile.

His decision not to appear, following indications he would, at the massive ‘show of strength’ gathering PAS summoned in Kota Baru last month was shrewd deference to feelings amongst the fledgling new coalition, Pakatan Harapan, that PAS’ lurch into unilateralism should not receive any encouragement from Pakatan Harapan quarters.

Allowing each other the latitude

Meanwhile, it would help alleviate matters if Pakatan Harapan components DAP, Parti Amanah Negara, and PKR allow each other the latitude that helps in better management of the problems peculiar to their respective situations.

For example, if DAP finds that their study of the situation in mixed-race seats in Selangor bolsters their confidence in making a play for them, it would be a confidence-building within Pakatan Harapan if those findings are vetted with Amanah rather than bandied about in the media.

Given the acrimony in the final years of the now-defunct Pakatan Rakyat, behaviour conducive of intra-coalition harmony in Harapan should be upheld.

Opposition supporters will be turned off, perhaps with finality, if there is a recurrence of the feuding that ultimately destroyed Pakatan Rakyat.

One sure way of the engendering the intramural wrangles is to discourage state conventions of component parties of Pakatan Harapan from turning into arenas where individual speakers snipe away, or worse threaten leaders of partner parties.

This is immature conduct which Pakatan Harapan should discourage in its components, or if it is inevitable in instances, the criticism should be lobbed in a discourse-inviting rather than in a contention-spawning manner.

This may sound a tad idealistic but if Pakatan Harapan, after the travails underwent by Pakatan Rakyat, does not carve a new and more constructive way of existing and dealing with internal difficulties, it will not bolster public confidence in its ability to take over Putrajaya.

The ruling BN government, in recent weeks, has sounded a new note of confidence that the albatross of 1MDB will not sink its chances at the next general election (GE14).

With PAS president Abdul Hadi Awang doing quite a destructive lot to boost this BN confidence that the opposition is in disarray and that that reality would allow BN to snatch victory from the jaws of 1MDB-induced defeat, Pakatan Harapan must tread carefully to ensure that a tottering ruling coalition’s new-found confidence is fanciful than realistic.

TERENCE NETTO has been a journalist for more than four decades. A sobering discovery has been that those who protest the loudest tend to replicate the faults they revile in others.