COMMENT Gordian knots are aplenty in Malaysian affairs, which is why often there is the need for political Alexanders to cut through the fog they exert on the body politic with one well-timed slice of a rapier.

The Federal Court’s verdict in a week’s time on the Anwar Ibrahim sodomy appeal may consign the opposition leader to a second spell in Sungai Buloh prison.

This outcome would well confirm Karl Marx’s well-worn prediction about history’s course - that it repeats itself, the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.

It must take political ingenuity of a rare order for those at the anvil to outwit those wielding the hammer in history’s course; there is that opportunity for the opposition Pakatan Rakyat to lever out of its prevailing stagnation.

Given the coalition’s present parlous condition - neither dead nor alive, which was what Umno said of the MCA in the immediate aftermath of May 13 - and the possibility that its originator may be removed from its top ranks, the question arises as to who would play the deputising role.

It ought to be Lim Kit Siang of the DAP, the party with the largest number of parliamentary seats in Pakatan, and the leader with most experience of the available candidates, just shy of a half century’s travail-filled worth’s.

But this choice would give Umno and its adjuncts, Perkasa and Isma, just the pretext to brand Pakatan a Trojan horse for Chinese domination of Malaysian politics.

No, no one with knowledge of how Malaysian politics revolves obsessively around the bugbears of race and religion would support the proposition of Kit Siang for holder of the fort while Anwar is made to cool his heels in Sungai Buloh.

The past year’s history of the error-prone ways of PAS president Abdul Hadi Awang ( left ) simply rules him out as replacement for the vacancy; in recent times, there has comparably not been a career that has wobbled and zigzagged the way Hadi’s did since early 2014.

Unless, of course, one considers Umno veep Ahmad Zahid Hamidi’s career, presently careening to disaster, but his was a spurious ascendancy within his party, owing more to a vacuous jingoism Dr Samuel Johnson memorably cautioned as the last refuge of scoundrels.

The deputy president of PKR and Menteri Besar of Selangor, Azmin Ali, at 51, would find that he’s a tad too young for the role and with latent opposition to him from within his party, he’d be a problematic proposition.

This would leave things open to a candidate out of left field - Husam Musa.

There’s word that the PAS vice-president is shaping to challenge Hadi for the president’s post at the party’s annual muktamar in June - that is if Hadi, who has not been in good health for some time, decides to run again.

Discreet campaign

A discreet campaign is under way to persuade Hadi, who assumed the presidency in 2002 when predecessor Fadzil Nor died and has been uncontested since, to stand down on health grounds.

But because a long-simmering struggle between the party’s progressives, among whom Husam is a signal member, and its conservatives appear headed for climatic denouement at June’s muktamar, the latter faction may feel that a Hadi withdrawal will be construed as a retreat.

So Hadi may be persuaded - the doubts about his health regardless - to stay, making a contest for the presidency all but inevitable.

Husam, though highly regarded in the party, could be viewed as handicapped for the battle in the he is only a state assembly rep (for Salor in Kelantan) while Hadi is a multiple-term parliamentarian for Marang.

If next Tuesday Anwar is convicted and imprisoned, his seat of Peramatang Pauh would fall vacant.

This is where Pakatan could think out of the box and choose to field Husam for the seat.

This move would be extraordinary in that a PAS luminary is fielded for the PKR supremo’s seat, which of course can be returned to the previous occupants in good time.

Such a move is just the sort of manoeuvre that equates with the severance of the Gordian knot; its panache and its voltage would electrify the opposition ranks.

It will demonstrate that that which unites Pakatan in its determination to replace Umno-BN is greater than that which divides the coalition into its fissiparous parts.

Husam would win Permatang Pauh with ease and, if he is chosen as the opposition leader by a majority vote within Pakatan, it will aid him in a campaign to gain the PAS presidency,

Admittedly, all this sounds a trifle fantastic for Malaysian politics until one considers that a denial of BN’s supermajority in Parliament enjoyed the same stature until March 2008 and a supercession of BN in the popular vote by Pakatan was not quite imaginable until May 2013.

Thinking out of the box is a Pakatan necessity, given its present situation of not really subsisting while not exactly expiring.

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.