KUALA LUMPUR, April 24 — PAS and DAP’s opposing stands on hudud suggest an irreconcilable difference that may boil to the surface should Pakatan Rakyat (PR) make it to Putrajaya, several political observers said.

They noted that both parties are held together now by the shared goal of unseating the ruling Barisan Nasional (BN), but said the antithetical ideologies of the secularist DAP and Islamic PAS may find it hard to co-exist once their common enemy is eliminated.

“If PAS leaders take a hard line on the Islamic state, then Pakatan will break up,” Dr Lim Teck Ghee from the Centre for Policy Initiatives think tank told The Malay Mail Online today.

“The hope is that the younger generation of PAS leaders will reform the party so it morphs into a moderate and progressive one that can work well with secular-based parties,” the political analyst added.

The glaring differences between PAS and DAP’s political agenda were only shelved temporarily in 2008 for the 12th general election. The results of the election, still referred to today as a “political tsunami”, later forced both parties together under the PR umbrella.

And it was this hastily formed PR pact, which was criticised repeatedly as a marriage of convenience, that helped the opposition front crumble BN’s fortresses in Perak, Selangor, Penang and Kedah.

PKR de facto leader Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim’s re-entry into politics in 2008 also served as a bridge between PAS and DAP.

Since then, PR has gone from strength to strength, from first taking away BN’s supermajority in Election 2008 before gaining further ground in last year’s general election.

But with the Opposition Leader’s own future now in doubt as a sodomy conviction hangs over him and age catches up, there are questions over who else can be the glue that holds the pact together..

Political analyst Datuk Dr Shamsul Amri Baharuddin told The Malay Mail Online that the relationship between the DAP and PAS was currently “very fragile”.

“Kept together by Anwar Ibrahim who is slowly losing his oomph!, PKR is getting undone, hence getting more visible and vocal. Karpal gone. No one else brave enough to confront PAS from PKR or DAP to counter PAS’ position,” added the analyst from Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia.

DAP stalwart Karpal Singh, who had been staunchly against hudud and the Islamic state that are PAS’s goals, was killed in a car accident on April 17. Since then, his colleagues have made it clear they will keep his anti-hudud torch burning, with DAP secretary-general Lim Guan Eng saying Monday that his party would not back down from its position on the matter.

He also reminded DAP’s allies in PR that hudud was not part of the pact’s consensus, and insisted that it will never be as the party will always oppose the idea.

Political analyst Ibrahim Suffian from Merdeka Center said it was possible that PR may split if PAS was adamant on implementing “hudud” in Kelantan.

“It’s largely because this is not in their common policy framework. The spectre of a break-up is there,” Ibrahim told The Malay Mail Online.

PAS announced plans this month to introduce two private members’ bills in Parliament to allow it to enforce the Shariah Criminal Enactment 1993 it passed in Kelantan.

But in doing so, it again resurrected the on-and-off conflict between DAP and PAS that dates back to the 1990s and which had kept the two from co-operating for decades.

When former Umno vice-president Tengku Razaleigh Hamzah formed Semangat 46 in 1989, to take on his old party, he enlisted the help of both DAP and PAS.

But their opposing stands forced Semangat 46 to form two separate alliances with the DAP and PAS to contest the 1990 general election as the two did not want to be seen as being in bed together.

In the west coast of the peninsula, the Semangat 46-DAP pact was called Gagasan Rakyat, while the Semangat 46-PAS alliance in the East Coast was named Angkatan Perpaduan Ummah.

While the opposing ideologies kept the two parties apart in 1990, it broke them when they did band together in 1999.

A year after then-deputy prime minister Anwar’s sacking and arrest in 1998, opposition parties PAS, DAP, PKR and the Malaysian People’s Party formed an alliance called “Barisan Alternatif” to take on BN in the 1999 general election.

Besides maintaining its hold on Kelantan, PAS also won Terengganu and bagged 27 federal seats in the 1999 polls.

The DAP, however, won just 10 parliamentary seats, while the newly-formed PKR snagged five.

Barisan Alternatif did not last long after the DAP pulled out from the coalition in 2001, citing irreconcilable differences with PAS on its insistence in creating an Islamic state.

In 1990, it was Karpal who famously declared, “an Islamic state over my dead body”.

In the watershed Election 2008, however, PKR, DAP and PAS agreed to cooperate and not to contest against each other, resulting in BN losing its customary two-thirds majority in Parliament and the subsequent creation of the PR alliance that gained more ground in Election 2013.

PAS’s attempt to push for hudud is not new. Previous attempts by PAS to table similar bills have been blocked by the BN-dominated Parliament and have never been voted on.

In all previous attempts, PAS had been frustrated by BN tactics to prevent any vote by employing a “talking out” tactic where BN MPs have been allowed to speak for an extended period of time to prevent such private members’ bills from even being debated. The filibuster-style tactic was frequently used when Dr Mahathir Mohamad was still prime minister.

But with Umno this time more openly supportive of PAS’s bid even as its own partners are not, the thorny issue of hudud may see history repeating itself all over again.