COMMENT The DAP suggestion that Pakatan Rakyat should have a prime minister-designate going into the next general election, is the consequence not only of what happened rather surreptitiously before the last polls, but is also a response to the possibility of Anwar Ibrahim losing his apex court appeal for sodomy.

Before GE13, a concensus was assumed to have settled on the choice of the PKR de facto leader as Pakatan’s PM-designate.

A coterie of PAS leaders disdained to abide by that consensus.

With a month to go to the May 5 election, they met with Anwar to tell him they would nominate Tengku Razaleigh Hamzah ( left ) of Umno should the opposition coalition win a parliamentary plurality.

That was rather untoward because it was the general assumption, then, that if Pakatan won, Anwar would be the coalition’s PM candidate.

Though sections of PAS were known to harbour doubts about Anwar as Pakatan’s choice for PM, opposition supporters generally assumed the doubters were fringe elements rather than significant power brokers in the Islamic party.

They learnt differently when a year after the election, PKR’s then-director of strategy Rafizi Ramli (he is presently secretary-general) disclosed that a slew of PAS higher-ups saw Anwar a month before the polls to tell him of their preference for Razaleigh.

Now this bit of furtive pre-GE13 manoeuvring has prompted DAP, for whom Anwar was the choice for PM, into preemptive mode vis-a-vis GE14.

No Pakatan in GE14?

DAP, the Pakatan component with the most parliamentary seats (37 to 30 for PKR and 21 for Pas), wants not only the PM designate endorsed in advance, but also demands agreement that hudud law will not be introduced.

This is virtually like saying that there won’t be a Pakatan coalition for GE14 because PAS seems determined, with Umno’s support, to introduce hudud in Kelantan.

PAS president Abdul Hadi Awang, who is MP for Marang, was to have introduced a private member’s bill in Parliament at its last session to that effect but deferred doing so for unaccounted reasons.

The matter is now regarded as abeyant rather than resolved one way or another.

Will the DAP demand of no-hudud under Pakatan push the issue out of this zone of ambiguity?

That would likely depend on the outcome of the contests in PAS next year when the party holds internal elections.

Observers predict a battle between conservatives and progressives for key posts in the party.

The outcome would significantly impact the PAS position on issues that would either sustain Pakatan through GE14 or break it up in advance.

PAS conservatives are loath to relent on imposing hudud, especially in Kelantan.

By contrast, the party’s progressives would be inclined to dress acquiescence to the DAP position in subterfuge; not for nothing is politics the art of the possible.

This raises the tricky question of what would happen if Anwar Ibrahim, currently the opposition leader in Parliament, loses his sodomy appeal in the Federal Court?

A decision impends and is awaited with equal parts of expectation and trepidation.

Need for polity to stay secular

The prophets of Pakatan’s doom have predicted the coalition’s demise on the certainty of intramural feuding over who should lead the coalition in the event Anwar is jailed.

An Anwar jailing would see the DAP insistent that a Pakatan PM-designate be announced in advance of GE14.

DAP is certain to insist that the designate understands that he, should Pakatan win GE14, would be occupying the PM’s office until Anwar is freed of legal encumbrances.

That understanding and public avowal by the designate of allegiance to the federal constitution which means the polity would stay secular, could see a PAS candidate like its vice-president, Husam Musa ( right in photo ), selected.

Husam has the intellectual amplitude and moral fibre to hold the office of PM.

Such a development within Pakatan cannot be ruled out, provided the progressives obtain a plurality in the PAS polls next year.

A victory for progressives would push them into broader collusion with the DAP and PKR. This should result in a more cohesive Pakatan.

However, if the conservatives triumph, there would be little hope of a coherent Pakatan going into GE14.

With a little over three years to go to GE14, the DAP is setting the terms for its cooperation with Pakatan.

These conditions are thought to be consonant with the expectations of voters who want the country returned to its founding ideals of a secularism not averse to religion, and a liberal democracy that is not licentious or permissive.

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.