Former Bangi MP Ong Kian Ming said yesterdah that Pakatan Harapan (PH) leaders are in denial about the growing dissatisfaction with the coalition, especially among non-Malay voters in Peninsular Malaysia.
Previously, he predicted that BN would win 53 of Johor's 56 seats, probably because he believes non-Malay voters are turning against PH.
While I think Ong Kian Ming's assessment has merit, I don't think the situation is quite as simple or straightforward as that.
The prevailing sentiment among many non-Malays in Peninsular Malaysia is this: we want to feel at ease, respected, cherished and appreciated for who we are. Right now, we do not feel that way because we believe that the Malays are making it more difficult, more shameful, and less worthy to openly be who we are.
We voted for PH because we believed PH would change that.
However, we now feel that PH has failed to do so. In fact, we feel that voting PH into power has angered many Malays, causing them to go the extra mile in making things more difficult for the non-Malays today. Ironically, it was our support that helped PH come to power, yet we now feel we are paying the political price for that support.
The sum total of all this is that today we feel that although PH won because of us, we feel more like losers after they won.
That is why the attitude of many non-Malay voters towards PH today is this: if you cannot make us feel like winners after we help you win, then perhaps we will let you lose, so that you can join us in feeling like a loser.
In other words, non-Malays are not necessarily anti-PH. If anything, many still identify strongly with PH's ideals.
It is precisely because we identify so strongly with PH that we want to feel like winners when PH wins and cause PH to be losers when we ourselves feel like losers.
If there is a party that non-Malays are against, it is PAS. It is that makes us feel that we won when it loses and we lost when it wins.
However, the political equation is becoming increasingly complicated.
Why?
Because PAS has made a more visible effort to reach out to non-Malay voters. PH, meanwhile, has struggled to make many non-Malays feel like winners despite being in government. At the same time, BN, particularly the Johor state government under Onn Hafiz, has generally been viewed as performing reasonably well, even though many non-Malay voters remain uncomfortable with the influence of Zahid Hamidi at the federal level.
As a result, our relationship with all the major political coalitions has become... complicated.
There is no single coalition that we clearly favour anymore. We also have many reasons why it will delight us to see all of them lose.
Yet making one coalition lose may unintentionally strengthen another. Likewise, supporting one coalition simply to teach another a lesson may produce consequences we never intended.
That leaves many non-Malay voters genuinely undecided until the very last minute.
So, I believe it is still impossible to predict what non-Malay voters in Johor will ultimately do—because many of them probably do not know what they are going to do themselves.
Our relationship with the political parties has become so complicated that many voters will likely postpone making their decision until the final days of the campaign—or even until they are standing right outside the polling station.
There are still three days before polling day.
Those three days could prove decisive, because any one event that happens during that period may be enough to change the minds of many non-Malay voters at the very last minute.
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