Dr Mahathir Mohamad will find it difficult to topple Prime Minister Najib Abdul Razak even through the 14th General Election (GE14), said Umno supreme council member Shahidan Kassim.
He said this was obvious because Najib was the leader of the Barisan Nasional (BN) which has 132 seats in the Dewan Rakyat compared to Parti Pribumi Bersatu Malaysia (PPBM) which has just one.
“To topple Najib through the general election… he has 132 seats and if you want to wrest all that, it is not easy.
“Dr Mahathir ‘s PPBM has only one… so it would be difficult for it to happen,” he said after launching Maran Umno’s Wanita Wing’s Delegates’ Conference in Maran today.
Shahidan, who is also a minister in the prime minister’s department, was commenting on media reports of Mahathir’s admission that he had planned to topple Najib since 2014.
Shahidan Kassim might like to consider some lessons in democracy, although it is granted that Malaysia is only a partial democracy, thanks to his party cheating the boundaries over 60 years of governance in its own favour.
He could start by considering this year’s election in France, where the charismatic Mr Macron started an entirely new party in the face of national disgust at the existing choices on offer …. and swept to take the Presidency.
Next Macron had to tackle the parliamentary elections, where his newly formed party had no existing seats at all. No matter, his new party again marched to victory and took the majority of seats, because the French were simply fed up with the entrenched contenders.
There is another older example in a tiny far off democracy that Shahidan might also like to consider. In the early 1980s in the island of Mauritius the ruling party, which had held power throughout the decades since independence, became embroiled in a corruption scandal.
The government ministers were complascent given their existing large majority, but when the election came their ruling party lost EVERY SINGLE SEAT!