Ijok By-Election: PKR’s Do or Die
I have been quietly observing the Ijok by-election lately, as it’s the hottest political news in Malaysia at the moment. For any of you who don’t know a thing about it, here are a few stats:
Ijok is a constituency in Selangor
Voters racial breakdown:
Malays - 51.8%
Chinese - 20.6%
Indians - 27.7%
BN (MIC) candidate: K. Parthiban - Education officer
PKR candidate: Khalid Ibrahim - Very prominent former corporate leader
Voting on this Saturday
More in-depth info available from Jeff Ooi’s post here.
This election is much more important to PKR than to MIC-BN. This is because of two features. The first is that Mr Khalid Ibrahim is a very impressive candidate, and Anwar managed to orchestrate a suprising coup when he managed to successfully convince him to join PKR. Therefore, if PKR still cannot win with such a good candidate, then what hope is there left for its other members? Secondly, this contest is more of a proxy war between Anwar Ibrahim and Najib Tun Razak than those two candidates. Anwar is featuring prominently in this contest, and this is PKR’s first election contest with Anwar out of jail. If he still fails to lead his party to a win, many will start questioning his political relevance.
From what’s being reported, it’s going to be a very close contest. But BN has pull out all stops at its first chance of directly embarrassing Anwar by declaring a massive RM36million pledge to fix up Ijok if it wins. ‘In government’ = ‘Lots of money to bribe constituencies with’, here in Malaysia.
I am very interested to see how PKR goes in this then. It doesn’t have any ’safe seats’ or strongholds at the moment, unlike DAP and PAS, and so it has to try and win new Malay-majority seats from BN and make them into its own. A hard act to do, and Ijok is its first try with Anwar leading.
That stats is dodgy. It turns out to be more than 100% and doesn’t make room for “dan lain-lain”. =)
Comment by __earth — April 25, 2007 @ 6:45 am
not anwar’s first since out of prison - he campaigned extensively in sarawak but PKR had only a 4% success rate there, by comparison to DAP’s 50% success rate.
Comment by KTemoc — April 25, 2007 @ 8:08 am
_earth: You’re right man! Lol, damn Malaysiakini and its dodgy stats.
KTemoc: You’re right as well. But I’ll give Anwar more leeway on this. PKR’s Sarawak campaign tried to win the largely Melanau community’s votes, which it failed to do. This campaign would be his first in leading PKR to compete in a Malay-majority seat in Peninsular Malaysia since his release from prison.
Comment by sigma — April 25, 2007 @ 1:20 pm