COMMENT Time was when a seat sharing deal among Pakatan Rakyat Johor was a cinch, with negotiations a breeze among its components - DAP, PKR and PAS.

It was Johor Pakatan that would be the first to announce the achievement of a deal, minus the inevitable backchat, post-negotiation, that revolves around on how much one component had sacrificed for the other.

NONE No such recriminations were once heard upon the completion of seat-sharing talks among Johor Pakatan.

The Johor Pakatan deal would be done pronto and the hard work of trying to win in seats where the opposition coalition had a sliver of a chance followed in earnest.

No doubt, this quickly-achieved consensus owed largely to the fact that Pakatan’s prospects were never rated highly, Johor – with its 26 parliamentary and 56 state seats – being regarded as an Umno-MCA bastion.

Model for the rest

Cavilers of the solidity of the Umno tie to MCA needed to look no further than Johor to have their qualms quashed by the evidence the southern state regularly supplied that Malay political and Chinese commercial interests meshed perfectly to sustain the understanding underpinning political governance in Malaysia.

abdul ghani othman bangsa malaysia 061106 talking From the time of the MB-ship of Othman Saat (from early 1970s to 1982) through to Muhyiddin Yassin (1986-95) and under the present Ghani Othman (1995- ) ( left ), Johor BN’s sustenance of this understanding was viewed as modular for the rest of the country.

All this was before Anwar Ibrahim’s insurgency in the northerly reaches of the peninsula obtained unprecedented success in the March 2008 general election.

Since then, Johor has not been the rock-like certainty that it was hitherto. True, Johor BN conceded one parliamentary (to DAP) and six state seats (four for DAP, two to Pas) in the 2008 election, paltry compared to BN losses elsewhere.

However, what was initially considered a more northerly erosion of support for the BN has become something of peninsula-wide malady, though it still is reckoned that Johor, together with Pahang and Malacca, has enough reserves of strength to withstand the malaise to federal BN’s electoral fortunes.

Rising support for Pakatan from among the Malays, especially the young; the continued slide in Chinese support for the BN; and uncertainty in how the Indian vote would go, have all combined to make Johor less formidably for BN.

debate on islamic state boo cheng hau in clinic Consequently, the telltale signs of disarray in seat-sharing talks among Johor Pakatan, as evidenced by the backchat issuing from Dr Boo Cheng Hau ( right ), state DAP chief, and sundry PKR functionaries.

Realistically, nobody expects seat-sharing talks among Pakatan components, no matter which state, to be friction-less; the opposition coalition’s prospects in the 13th general election being rated better than ever and hence the maneuvering among components for advantage has become divisively keener.

But dissonance in Johor Pakatan would be hard to quell given the peculiarities. The death of Razak Ahmad, once Johor PKR chief, in 2007 complicated matters affecting the delicacy of the deal worked out among the state chiefs of PKR, DAP and Pas during his time.

It was Razak who obtained for PKR the Gelang Patah parliamentary seat for the 2004 general election on the understanding that it would be given back at a later date.

Razak’s stature in the coalition was sufficiently lofty to pare away reservations about the wisdom of that concession by the DAP which had previously contested Gelang Patah.

A vote for Boo, a vote for PKR

Now when DAP wants PR to return the seat, primarily because Dr Boo stands a good chance of winning it – he having impressively snared the state ward of Skudai that comes under Gelang Patah in the last election – Johor PKR chief Chua Jui Meng has averred his party is not bound by previous understandings.

This is most unfortunate for reasons other than personal honour: it is not a certainty the votes that would go for the re-election of the hard-working Dr Boo in Skudai would translate into votes for the PKR parliamentary candidate for Gelang Patah.

pkr congress 271110 jimmy chua jui meng It didn’t at the last election where the PKR candidate lost to the MCA incumbent, and it is not expected to go to Chua ( right ) should be stand in Gelang Patah.

Chua knows this which is why he is looking at the other parliamentary seats in Johor but none is as good as Bakri, his fief when he was in MCA.

But DAP is safely ensconced in Bakri, rendering a certain plaintiveness to Chua’s lament during seat-sharing talks that DAP has keeps all the “abalone” in terms of seats in Johor, leaving PKR with the “cockles”.

Marine metaphors aside, the contretemps over seat-sharing talks among Johor Pakatan are not going to be resolved unless Pakatan central takes a nationwide perspective rather than just a state-focused one. Only such a wide-angle lens would yield a solution.

 

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. It is the ideal occupation for a temperament that finds power fascinating and its exercise abhorrent.