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By P Gunasegaram
History is a pretty good predictor of how people behave in future. If a person or party has been upright in the past and the behaviour impeccable, chances are they will remain that way going forward. If they are tainted alreadu, the prognosis is bleak.
In the wake of news reports that Muda is looking to form an alliance of sorts with newly revived Parti Bersama Malaysia, it would be appropriate to look at some recent history as a pointer to the future.
According to FMT, in a report quoting sources, Muda and former PKR deputy president Rafizi Ramli are said to be discussing a possible collaboration as the Pandan MP prepares to unveil a “new political direction” on Sunday.
A source close to the matter said Muda, through its deputy president Zaidel Baharuddin, offered to work with Rafizi last month.
“Johor may be the testing ground for this collaboration,” the source, who spoke on condition of anonymity, told FMT, referring to the next state polls, where Muda is eyeing between five and 10 seats.
The prime example of a costly history lesson is when Pakatan Harapan handed power on a platter over to Mahathir Mohamad, thinking that allying with him is safe ahead of GE14, 2018. They could not have been more mistaken.
Mahathir’s Bersatu, contesting about the same number of seats as PKR of just over 50 seats in Peninsular Malaysia, won just 13 seats, a win rate here of 25 per cent against PKR’s 80 per cent. Despite that, Mahathir became Harapan’s chosen leader, holding the reins ostensibly in trust for Anwar Ibrahim.
The leopard kept its spots
It was clear that if Harapan had gone alone, it could have won more seats than by allying with Mahathir, a sworn enemy of current prime minister Anwar Ibrahim. I explained this here.
Mahathir had no intention of passing power to Anwar. No surprise that Harapan lost the government eventually - as the leopard kept all its spots.
Fast forward to 2022 and GE15. Harapan made an electoral pact with Muda. Muda contested six parliamentary seats where Harapan would not field candidates. Only its president then, Syed Saddiq Abdul Rahman won, by a very narrow margin of over 1,000 votes, in Muar.
If not for the electoral pact, Syed Saddiq would likely have lost. In the other five seats, credible numbers were likely obtained only because of the electoral pact. In some of these seats - Tanjong Piai, Kepala Batas, Tanjong Karang, Masjid Tanah and Kota Marudu - a Harapan candidate could potentially have won, barring the last one.
Syed Saddiq subsequently acted more as an independent than being allied with Harapan, eventually breaking off with Harapan altogether. That’s a seat that could have been Harapan’s with perhaps a couple from the other five, a potential loss of three seats needlessly for Harapan.
Muda falls heavily
In the 2023 state elections, Muda fielded 19 candidates across six states, contesting some against Harapan too and splitting votes. All of them lost their election deposits, showing beyond a shadow of a doubt that the party had hardly any support.
Syed Saddiq was still president at that time. He did not contest in the March 2026 party elections because of pending court cases, with Amira Aisya Abdul Aziz being elected president instead.
Is there anything new that Muda has to offer in an alliance of any sort with Bersama? Of course not. Muda is fighting hard to stay alive and the only way it can do that is to ally with somebody else who is stronger so that it can rise on their coattails.
That’s Syed Saddiq’s playbook. He owes his rapid rise in politics to Mahathir who chose him, despite his youth and inexperience, to contest in Muar in 2018 under Bersatu and Harapan. He followed into Pejuang, Mahathir’s breakaway party.
Astutely, he saw it had no future as Mahathir was fully discredited publicly. He formed Muda, a party so totally unlike Bersatu and Pejuang which restricted membership only to bumiputeras, as to be unrecognisable from both.
In an about turn, he positioned it as a polar opposite - a multi-racial youth party.
Go it alone. Bersama
Despite his inexperience in 2018, Mahathir put him in the cabinet as youth and sports minister, eschewing many more experienced candidates in Harapan, including Rafizi Ramli and Nik Nazmi Nik Ahmad who now spearhead Bersama.
Bersama should beware of being used for political opportunism by any person or political party, including Muda, which is looking for an anchor to prevent it from sinking into total oblivion at the next polls without anyone to keep it afloat.
Finally, we thought Anwar Ibrahim had changed irrevocably after his arrest and punishment. But he is now playing games and making moves the way Umno did - the Umno DNA proved immutable. The tiger kept its stripes but discarded reformasi.
This is what Rafizi said when he announced the revival of Bersama: “The problem with the ‘second or third force’ (concept) is that it subjects the public to choose the lesser of two evils - what is important now is that we have to offer something fundamentally different and progressive.
“That is why we said we will be looking at any and all seats, so long as we think there is demand and our participation will have an impact on national polls,” he added.
An alliance of any sort so early in the game with Muda and Syed Saddiq, its only elected representative, will not serve the cause of a fundamentally different and progressive alternative that Bersama envisages.
Bersama does not need Muda. Keep credibility alive, fight the good fight - go it alone.
(P Gunasegaram says often the lonelier path is the better one in the longer term.)
P Gunasegaram (t.p.guna@gmail.com) is a content creator under the Newswav Creator programme, where you get to express yourself, be a citizen journalist, and at the same time monetize your content & reach millions of users on Newswav. Log in to creator.newswav.com and become a Newswav Creator now!
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