Gerakan can hardly claim Teluk Intan as a turning point
My article was earlier published in TheAntDaily.com on 8/6/2014
Gerakan president Datuk Mah Siew Keong has wrested the seat back for the Barisan Nasional in the recently concluded Teluk Intan parliamentary by-election.
However, the Gerakan chief only obtained 20,157 votes while the Pakatan Rakyat candidate, DAP’s Dyana Sofya Mohd Daud, got 19,919 votes. Mah won with a majority of 238 votes. This is a very close call for BN and Gerakan in their fight against DAP who twice defeated BN in the 2008 and 2013 general elections.
Never mind the outcome. Both sides, whether the winner or loser, ought to be mindful of the voters and people’s expectations. As everyone is aware, only some 67 per cent of the total 60,349 registered voters turned up. So, where were the other 19,000-plus voters? Even the number of spoilt votes was unexpectedly high, at about 550. Many political observers are also surprised by results that favoured BN.
Let us analyse the strategy of DAP. Why was Dyana Sofya fielded in Teluk Intan in the first place? Well, it is an open secret that factional tussle in the Perak DAP has been intense from the outset. The northern faction is headed by the Ngeh-Nga cousins (Datuk Ngeh Koo Ham is the Perak DAP advisor and his cousin Nga Kor Ming is the state’s party chairman), while the southern faction is led by Ipoh Barat MP M Kulasegaran, who is DAP national vice-chairman.
When the Teluk Intan MP Seah Leong Peng passed away on May 1 due to cancer, both the northern and southern factions forwarded their candidates to the party central committee and both groups lobbied hard for the seat. The late Seah was aligned to the southern faction.
Not wanting to see the two factions engage in a fierce battle in the state chapter, the central committee opted for a neutral candidate, Dyana, as a strategy to ease the tensions.
Ipoh-born Dyana is the political secretary to DAP adviser Lim Kit Siang, who is also the Gelang Patah MP, while Seah was a Teluk Intan resident who won the seat for DAP by a majority of 7,313 votes in last year’s general election.
What went wrong for DAP then? It was the factional tussle within the party’s state chapter that may have caused many party supporters to ditch their votes in protest over Dyana’s candidacy by not voting or they may have turned up and spoilt their votes. These DAP members and supporters protested because their preferred candidate was not picked. Furthermore, Dyana is not a local in Teluk Intan and she is unknown to the local DAP members there.
During campaigning, these local DAP leaders and members were not at the scene all the time and most of them only showed up when national leaders came by, then left after the top leaders were gone.
The DAP leadership had also predicted the newcomer would win by riding on national issues, from the Goods and Services Tax (GST), to youth and women empowerment. Other than that, DAP also wanted to project its multiracial stand.
As for Mah, he cannot take his victory for granted as he only won by a wafer-thin margin. The Gerakan president must also remember that he has been defeated twice with a 1,470- and 7,313-vote majority respectively in the last two general elections. It should be noted that BN’s win in Teluk Intan was actually Umno’s victory. Without Umno’s help, Gerakan is inconsequential and ineffective.
Furthermore, Mah, Gerakan and other BN leaders should not gloat over this victory simply because of the absence of 33 per cent of the registered voters, coupled with the high number of spoilt votes. BN leaders cannot claim this as their turning point.
One of the major winning factors for BN is its effective race-based politics which it has been expounding for decades. The racially segregated campaigning by BN was well-organised with Umno tackling the Malay voters with allegations of anti-Islam, anti-Malay and Christianisation against DAP, alleging that the DAP candidate was un-Malay and westernised. Even the fake “bikini clad” pictures of the DAP candidate were widely circulated to great effect. MCA and Gerakan, on the other hand, were tasked with working the Chinese areas urging voters to “vote for a Chinese only”, pointing out the PAS’ hudud plan as DAP’s weakness. MIC did the same on the Indian voters as well.
BN campaigners, particularly MCA and Gerakan, had actively exploited Dyana’s alleged link to a racist and extremist Malay NGO, Perkasa, whom her mother had once associated with. Umno’s firm grip on many rural Malay villages had also prevented DAP’s Pakatan partners PKR and PAS from penetrating these areas.
Whether it was a mistake or mismatched political strategy, DAP had taken this risk and it has to face up to it. At the end of the day, it was the “local” and race factors which it should have looked into in not-so-urban Teluk Intan.
As for BN, this is not a honeymoon for Gerakan as its victory had solely depended on Umno’s machinery and Malay votes. This victory is just a small recovery as Gerakan was almost wiped out in the last two general elections.
This small win will again put Gerakan to test to see if it dares to stand up to the dominant and “powerful” Umno, tackling the rising racism and extremism from within the ruling coalition. It remains to be seen how Gerakan as a multiracial party can change BN and its race-based allies from within.
Another big question is whether Mah can afford to be a tough-talking, no-nonsense leader and a “fighter” to face off the bullies in the BN once he accepts the ministerial position promised by Umno president and BN chairman Datuk Seri Najib Razak.
Gerakan president Datuk Mah Siew Keong has wrested the seat back for the Barisan Nasional in the recently concluded Teluk Intan parliamentary by-election.
However, the Gerakan chief only obtained 20,157 votes while the Pakatan Rakyat candidate, DAP’s Dyana Sofya Mohd Daud, got 19,919 votes. Mah won with a majority of 238 votes. This is a very close call for BN and Gerakan in their fight against DAP who twice defeated BN in the 2008 and 2013 general elections.
Never mind the outcome. Both sides, whether the winner or loser, ought to be mindful of the voters and people’s expectations. As everyone is aware, only some 67 per cent of the total 60,349 registered voters turned up. So, where were the other 19,000-plus voters? Even the number of spoilt votes was unexpectedly high, at about 550. Many political observers are also surprised by results that favoured BN.
Let us analyse the strategy of DAP. Why was Dyana Sofya fielded in Teluk Intan in the first place? Well, it is an open secret that factional tussle in the Perak DAP has been intense from the outset. The northern faction is headed by the Ngeh-Nga cousins (Datuk Ngeh Koo Ham is the Perak DAP advisor and his cousin Nga Kor Ming is the state’s party chairman), while the southern faction is led by Ipoh Barat MP M Kulasegaran, who is DAP national vice-chairman.
When the Teluk Intan MP Seah Leong Peng passed away on May 1 due to cancer, both the northern and southern factions forwarded their candidates to the party central committee and both groups lobbied hard for the seat. The late Seah was aligned to the southern faction.
Not wanting to see the two factions engage in a fierce battle in the state chapter, the central committee opted for a neutral candidate, Dyana, as a strategy to ease the tensions.
Ipoh-born Dyana is the political secretary to DAP adviser Lim Kit Siang, who is also the Gelang Patah MP, while Seah was a Teluk Intan resident who won the seat for DAP by a majority of 7,313 votes in last year’s general election.
What went wrong for DAP then? It was the factional tussle within the party’s state chapter that may have caused many party supporters to ditch their votes in protest over Dyana’s candidacy by not voting or they may have turned up and spoilt their votes. These DAP members and supporters protested because their preferred candidate was not picked. Furthermore, Dyana is not a local in Teluk Intan and she is unknown to the local DAP members there.
During campaigning, these local DAP leaders and members were not at the scene all the time and most of them only showed up when national leaders came by, then left after the top leaders were gone.
The DAP leadership had also predicted the newcomer would win by riding on national issues, from the Goods and Services Tax (GST), to youth and women empowerment. Other than that, DAP also wanted to project its multiracial stand.
As for Mah, he cannot take his victory for granted as he only won by a wafer-thin margin. The Gerakan president must also remember that he has been defeated twice with a 1,470- and 7,313-vote majority respectively in the last two general elections. It should be noted that BN’s win in Teluk Intan was actually Umno’s victory. Without Umno’s help, Gerakan is inconsequential and ineffective.
Furthermore, Mah, Gerakan and other BN leaders should not gloat over this victory simply because of the absence of 33 per cent of the registered voters, coupled with the high number of spoilt votes. BN leaders cannot claim this as their turning point.
One of the major winning factors for BN is its effective race-based politics which it has been expounding for decades. The racially segregated campaigning by BN was well-organised with Umno tackling the Malay voters with allegations of anti-Islam, anti-Malay and Christianisation against DAP, alleging that the DAP candidate was un-Malay and westernised. Even the fake “bikini clad” pictures of the DAP candidate were widely circulated to great effect. MCA and Gerakan, on the other hand, were tasked with working the Chinese areas urging voters to “vote for a Chinese only”, pointing out the PAS’ hudud plan as DAP’s weakness. MIC did the same on the Indian voters as well.
BN campaigners, particularly MCA and Gerakan, had actively exploited Dyana’s alleged link to a racist and extremist Malay NGO, Perkasa, whom her mother had once associated with. Umno’s firm grip on many rural Malay villages had also prevented DAP’s Pakatan partners PKR and PAS from penetrating these areas.
Whether it was a mistake or mismatched political strategy, DAP had taken this risk and it has to face up to it. At the end of the day, it was the “local” and race factors which it should have looked into in not-so-urban Teluk Intan.
As for BN, this is not a honeymoon for Gerakan as its victory had solely depended on Umno’s machinery and Malay votes. This victory is just a small recovery as Gerakan was almost wiped out in the last two general elections.
This small win will again put Gerakan to test to see if it dares to stand up to the dominant and “powerful” Umno, tackling the rising racism and extremism from within the ruling coalition. It remains to be seen how Gerakan as a multiracial party can change BN and its race-based allies from within.
Another big question is whether Mah can afford to be a tough-talking, no-nonsense leader and a “fighter” to face off the bullies in the BN once he accepts the ministerial position promised by Umno president and BN chairman Datuk Seri Najib Razak.
