DAP will be able to help Pakatan Harapan win the Kedah state government if DAP contests in Kulim and Gurun

In the past week, I had discussed the possibility of Pakatan Harapan (PH) winning 113 parliament seats in Peninsular Malaysia with the help of a Malaysian tsunami which will rid the country of BN’s 60 year rule and allow us to start on a clean slate under a new government.

This Malaysian tsunami will take place if 10% of Malays and 5% of non-Malays were to switch their votes from the BN in the 13th General Election in 2013 to PH in the forthcoming 14th General Election and that voters make a clear distinction between supporting PH and rejecting PAS.

Under these circumstances, even with PAS playing the role of a spoiler, PH will not only win the majority of parliament seats in Peninsular Malaysia, it will also win control of the state governments in Perak, Negeri Sembilan and Johor in addition to retaining Penang and Selangor with even larger majorities compared to GE2013.

Under this scenario however, the outcome in Kedah will be a 18-18 deadlock between the Pakatan Harapan and Barisan Nasional, with PAS unable to win a single seat in Kedah although PAS candidates will be responsible for BN winning 14 of the 18 seats because of split votes.

DAP will be able to help Pakatan Harapan break this 18-18 deadlock so that PH can win the Kedah state government if DAP contests in Kulim and Gurun state assembly seats as well as to mobilise support for Pakatan Harapan candidates in Central and Southern Kedah, instead of just being focused on the two state assembly seats in Alor Setar.

UMNO is facing the greatest crisis of its life. The Prime Minister, Datuk Seri Najib Razak had missed the golden opportunity in the 12 months from June/July 2016 – 2017 after the Sarawak State general elections and the two Sungai Besar and Kuala Kangsar by-elections to dissolve Parliament and call elections, when UMNO/BN might have won big.

But Malaysian politics underwent a seismic political development on July 14, when Pakatan Harapan announced its structure, logo and leadership line-up, signifying that a political tsunami in the urban areas could not only be sustained but that a political tsunami among the Malay voters in the rural areas is also possible.

In the past five weeks, Najib and the UMNO leadership suffered from an attack of nerves, because for the first time in UMNO history, UMNO face the prospects of historic triple losses, all happening at the same time in the next general election, viz:

• UMNO’s loss of support of the majority of Malay voters in the country.
• UMNO’s loss of support of the majority of the 1.6 million civil servants in the country.
• UMNO’s loss of the support of the highest percentage of UMNO members (at present, 3.5 million UMNO members) at any general election in the nation’s history.

If Pakatan Harapan can continue to reignite hope among Malaysians that the 14th General Election could see a change of political power in Putrajaya, as well in at least six states including Kedah, then we are set for the most challenging general election outing in the 14th General Election.