UMNO told to get into election mood
UMNO told to get into election mood
Jalil Hamid, Reuters, Kuala Lumpur
Malaysia's ruling party leaders whipped up expectations of an early election on the eve of their annual party conference, with the Islamic opposition's image still suffering from a militancy scare after Sept. 11.
"We should be in election mood," Rafidah Aziz, International Trade and Industry Minister told a meeting of the women's wing of the United Malays National Organization (UMNO) on Wednesday.
The Barisan Nasional (National Front) coalition that UMNO leads has two years of its term still to run, but odds narrowed on an early election after Sept.11 saw a sharp upturn in fortunes for Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad.
"Everyone is expecting an early election. The only question is how early," Lim Kit Siang, leader of the mainly Chinese opposition Democratic Action Party, told Reuters. "If it was in the next six months it would be a surprise."
Sept. 11 made many Malaysians grateful for a strong leader like the 76-year-old Mahathir, who has kept the peace among the races during his 21 years in power and is regarded as progressive on religious issues.
His police have locked up more than 60 suspected militants in the past year. Some of them admitted this week to receiving arms training in Afghanistan and the southern Philippines.
Aside from rallying support, Mahathir will use the next three days to persuade grassroots members to bless his plans to snip away at some Malay privileges guaranteeing them college places.
The moves are incremental, but after three decades of affirmative action many Malays remain fiercely defensive of the props given to help them compete against the better off Chinese.
In the 1999 election, more than half the Malay vote turned against UMNO after Mahathir's deputy Anwar Ibrahim was sacked and jailed following a challenge to the prime minister a year earlier. The coalition just scraped a two-thirds majority.
Most of the anti-Mahathir Malay vote went to Parti Islam se- Malaysia (PAS), which wants to turn Malaysia into an Islamic state although nearly half the people are non-Muslims.
On Tuesday Mahathir telling PAS's de facto leader Abdul Hadi Awang he was in danger of damnation for trying to pass strict Islamic sharia laws in Terengganu, one of two states controlled by PAS.
The Keadilan (Justice) party, led by Anwar's wife and allied to PAS, is in disarray as their leaders quit in the last year, disenchanted with Anwar.
Lim, who took the DAP out of an alliance with PAS and Keadilan after Sept.11, says the opposition parties have less chance of breaking that two-thirds majority at the next election than they did three years ago.