Zaid previously said he would rather be labelled an “ungrateful Malay” instead of a “stupid one”. — File pic
KUALA
LUMPUR, Sept 26 ― The next general elections will reveal if the
majority Malays are ready to abandon “the path chosen for them by Umno
for the last 55 years” and seek other answers to the problems they face,
says political maverick Datuk Zaid Ibrahim.
The former Umno minister said he sensed the Malay nationalist party
was fearful of the community’s changing mindset, which has prompted Tun
Dr Mahathir Mohamad to castigate “so-called ungrateful Malays” recently.
His comments came as a Universiti Malaya survey showed that the
Umno-led Barisan Nasional (BN) will continue to govern the country
despite rising support for Pakatan Rakyat (PR).
“This election, more than the previous ones, will show if the Malays
and the Bumiputeras are ready to abandon the path chosen for them by
Umno for the last 55 years,” Zaid said in an email to
The Malaysian Insider.
“This election will show if they are now ready to trust themselves.
For so long, they have implicit and absolute trust in their leaders. The
question is will they continue to do that or will they seek alternative
answers to the many problems they face in their daily lives,” he added.
Umno
was founded in 1946 to oppose the Malayan Union established by the
British colonialists to unite all states in the Malay peninsula, which
were mainly agrarian then. Umno’s second president, Tunku Abdul Rahman
Putra Al-Haj, together with allies MCA and MIC negotiated Malaya’s
independence in 1957 and later formed Malaysia with Sabah, Sarawak and
Singapore. Singapore was then expelled in 1965.
The original Alliance comprising Umno, MCA and MIC was expanded to
become BN in the 1974 election, after the 1969 race riots that cost
Tunku Abdul Rahman his job. Umno was later deregistered in 1988 after a
leadership split led to the discovery of illegal branches. The current
Umno is officially registered as Umno Baru. A splinter group in 1951
later became known as PAS, which advocates an Islamist state.
BN suffered historic losses in Election 2008, losing five states and
its customary two-thirds parliamentary majority. The defeat prompted Tun
Abdullah Badawi to resign a year later as prime minister in favour of
Datuk Seri Najib Razak, who has been tirelessly campaigning to win back
support for the ruling BN. Najib has promised reforms but has yet to
indicate when he will call for the election, which must be held by
middle of 2013.
Former prime minister Dr Mahathir (
right) has said
November would be ideal for a snap election and, while calling the
Malays “ungrateful” and “lacking intelligence”, warned that the greed of
a few power-hungry Malays in the opposition would see the country’s
dominant race lose its political power.
In his lengthy tirade against the Malays in the Mingguan Malaysia
weekly on Sunday, Dr Mahathir expressed sadness that the Malays were now
purportedly split into three factions and said that this has resulted
in them “begging” for support from the other races.
“Who brought on this disaster? No other than the Malays themselves,
greedy Malays, Malays lacking in intelligence, Malays easily influenced
by lust, easily dominated by hatred when agitated,” he continued in
typical no-holds-barred fashion.
Zaid, who built the country’s largest law partnership before entering
politics, had denounced Dr Mahathir’s statement, saying he would rather
be “ungrateful Malay” than be considered a “stupid one”.
“I sense that Umno is now fearful of the Malay mindset change. That’s
why their chief ideologue, Dr M, has launched these incessant attacks
on the so called ungrateful Malays. These Malays are not ungrateful;
they have just discovered that there is life after Umno,” he said in his
email to
The Malaysian Insider.
His observation came as a survey by University of Malaya’s Centre for
Democracy and Elections (UMCEDEL) found that BN garnered 44 per cent of
support among those polled, a drop from last March’s results that stood
at 49 per cent. There was also a growing number of people who believed
that PR could take over Putrajaya, from 21 per cent in March to 30 per
cent in the survey “Polling Trends in the Run-up to the 13th General
Election” carried out from September 1-16.
The survey results also indicated that PR would likely hold onto
Selangor and Kedah but there was a drop in support among Kelantan
residents towards the state’s PAS-led government.
The face-to-face survey involved 1,536 respondents, from across all
three major ethnic groups. Each person was randomly selected to answer a
structured survey.
The survey also showed that Najib’s popularity fell from 61 per cent in March to 58 per cent this month.
