The Malaysian Insight

ANNUAR Musa is evidence that Umno will have a gargantuan time recovering its place at the head of the table in Malaysia, going by his statements about Umno’s performance in the May 9 polls.

Obviously, the Umno information chief chooses to believe his own narrative to the party and Barisan Nasional’s (BN) disastrous outing that led them to lose the government for the first time since Merdeka.

See, humility and the ability to be a gracious loser must be the starting points of any rebuilding effort.

But here he is playing the race and religious card that served Umno so poorly and made it impossible for BN component parties to win support from their traditional base.

Citing “preliminary statistics” without any attribution, Annuar said that Umno had the majority support of the Malay-Muslim electorate GE14 as he sought to paint Pakatan Harapan (PH) as a “non-Malays only” coalition.

“If we look at the pattern, nearly 60% of Malay-Muslim voters gave their support to Umno. We should highlight this so that people don’t forget the support Umno has and so that they will help it rise and make a comeback,” Annuar told the party’s website, Umno Online.

Umno won 54 of BN’s 79 seats in Parliament. PH won 122 out of 222 seats to form the federal government but its component parties each won less than Umno’s total in the May 9 polls.

PH secured 47.88% of the popular vote in GE14, including from seats gained through its Sabah ally, Parti Warisan Sabah. BN’s share of the popular vote was 33.8%, while Islamist PAS, through Gagasan Sejahtera, took 17%. This puts their combined share of the popular vote at 50.8%, higher than PH’s.

Annuar blamed non-Malays and non-Muslims who defeated Umno when the Malay vote was split between Umno and PAS.

“Whereas Umno remains as a party that has the mandate from Malays and Muslims. Only that it did not get enough of a mandate from Chinese and non-Muslims, from component parties MCA and Gerakan,” he said, not mentioning that BN also lost unexpectedly in some Dayak seats in Sarawak, where PH increased its haul of six federal seats in 2013 to 10 in GE14.

“For the first time in election history, Umno and BN only received around 2% of votes from non-Malays,” he said.

He highlighted the fact that MCA only won one seat, MIC two and Gerakan none, adding: “Umno lost as part of BN”.

Perhaps Annuar needs to look at it another way. That these component parties also lost because they were partners of Umno in BN.

The reality is this, Annuar and his ilk in Umno have to understand that they have to go beyond a narrow, sectarian and racial mindset to win back power in Malaysia.

At the very least, stop blaming others for not voting for you or your party. That’s just a sore loser of a little boy sulking in the corner of the room. – June 2, 2018