AS preparations for the 14th General Election (GE14) gear up several notches, the news coming out of Sarawak is that the state Barisan Nasional (BN) is aiming to further improve on its already solid performance from the last electoral outing.
Chief Minister Datuk Patinggi Abang Johari Abang Openg set the benchmark last week as he leads the state BN into a general election for the very first time.
The new target being publicly aired is for the state BN to send 28 of its members to the next Parliament. This will require the state’s ruling coalition to wrest from the opposition, Pakatan Harapan (PH), three of the six seats the latter currently holds. The three additional seats the state BN hopes to add are all urban opposition strongholds which used to held by state BN component Sarawak United People’s Party (SUPP).
The other three Sarawak BN parties — Parti Pesaka Bumiputra Bersatu (PBB), Parti Rakyat Sarawak (PRS) and the Progressive Democratic Party (PDP) — made a clean sweep of the seats they contested the last time around. The conventional wisdom is that these three parties will retain their clean winning records. PBB currently has 14 MPs, PRS six and PDP four. SUPP has a lone MP remaining now.
BN’s electoral hopes this time around have been revived following the significant gains made by SUPP and its breakaway United People’s Party (UPP) in the 2016 state election. This, despite simmering animosities arising out of the break-up of the two Chinese-based parties which necessitated the then chief minister, the late Tan Sri Adenan Satem, deciding to let UPP (which is not officially a BN component) field “direct BN candidates”.
With GE14, the direct-BN- candidate loophole has been foreclosed. SUPP and UPP recently entered into what has been widely perceived as a “shotgun marriage” as they both signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) which stipulated that only SUPP, as an official BN party, would field candidates in seats it used to hold.
Abang Johari, as state BN chairman, witnessed the MoU and described it as fulfilling the aspirations of the Chinese community in Sarawak (expressed most often by various Chinese community leaders) for both parties to seek a common ground to reconcile and reunite. This is, of course, all the more imperative given that PH, which seems to rely almost exclusively on winning in Sarawak at the expense of BN’s Chinese voters alone, is entering the electoral hustings with a sense of renewed vigour and confidence.
There is, therefore, the hope that the SUPP-UPP MOU will eventually lead to both parties merging into a single party once again. That seems to be the only realistic hope for the state’s Chinese community to return to its once lofty political positions in the government, both at state and Federal. There was a time when SUPP used to be represented at federal by a full minister and two deputy ministers. It speaks to the BN’s overall concept of power-sharing, that despite SUPP holding only one parliamentary seat in the current Dewan Rakyat, its lone MP and deputy president, Datuk Seri Richard Riot, was still appointed as a full minister.
In a parliamentary democracy such as ours, politics is fundamentally a numbers game. Nobody seems to understand this better than Abang Johari, who explained that a better than expected showing in GE14 by Sarawak will only increase the state’s leverage when the next Federal Government is formed.
Together, Sabah and Sarawak MPs make up fully a quarter of the current Dewan Rakyat. If Sarawak BN can retain the feat of almost sweeping the state’s entire slate of MPs, its envious position as king-maker will be all but unassailable.
Chinese voters in Sarawak, thus, have a crucial decision to make come GE14. Will they stand united in full solidarity with the state BN by giving SUPP their resounding support or will they opt to stand apart in the seemingly forlorn hope that by casting their lonely minority voice firmly once again with the state PH camp, it will somehow translate into effective and meaningful change?
The usually sophisticated Chinese voters in Sarawak confront a finely-tuned and rather exquisite electoral choice: they can choose to vote strategically by electing to be a full partner in the state’s all-but- assured king-maker role or they can continue to vote based mostly on emotion and have their already diminishing voice within the state further diluted.
John Teo views developments in the nation, region and the wider world from his vantage point in Kuching, Sarawak.