KUALA LUMPUR, April 21 — The defeat of Wanita Umno chief Tan Sri Shahrizat Abdul Jalil in Lembah Pantai on March 8, 2008, at the hands of a young and inexperienced Opposition leader at the time turned the parliamentary seat into one of the fiercest political battlegrounds today.
Umno president Datuk Seri Najib Razak’s decision to field party heavyweight Datuk Raja Nong Chik Abdullah in the 13th general election reflected the ruling party’s desire to reclaim the seat from PKR vice-president Nurul Izzah Anwar.
Despite a closely-fought contest, the “Puteri Reformasi” retained her seat in 2013, but is now set to leave the area for her mother’s Permatang Pauh federal constituency.
It is understood that Raja Nong Chik will likely stand again there on May 9, and talk is rife among constituents that the Umno leader has poured time, money and effort into the area since 2013, in his determination to wrest the seat.
The new PKR candidate for Lembah Pantai, Fahmi Fadzil, said the constituency is important to Barisan Nasional because of the demographics. If the ruling coalition can win an urban seat that houses both the affluent and the poor at the heart of Kuala Lumpur, it breaks down perception that BN is no longer welcome among more educated and exposed voters.
“Najib wants a two-third.. and (Lembah Pantai) truly reflects Malaysia’s composition,” Fahmi told Malay Mail in a recent interview.
Lembah Pantai is in the southwest of Kuala Lumpur bordering Seputeh to the east and Segambut to the north. It is home not only to one of the most affluent neighbourhoods in the country but probably some of the city’s poorest urban voters too.
Despite the class dichotomy, the different communities live in the hundreds of mixed large and small residential areas usually located just next to each other.
One of the most popular is Bangsar, a vibrant neighbourhood famous for its swanky restaurants and bars. While the electorate are predominantly middle-income earners, they live amid some of the wealthiest Malaysians.
Many analysts believed it was the middle and upper class electorates of Lembah Pantai that
helped Nurul Izzah mount two successive campaigns there, giving rise to perception that the seat’s less privileged voters were mostly pro-Umno.
Rich among the poor
But Fahmi said this was a popular misconception. While Lembah Pantai may be synonymous with the affluent, the bottom 40 percentile (B40) make up the bulk of its voters.
“Definitely the B40,” Fahmi told Malay Mail when asked to describe the seat’s main demographic. “The PPRs (public housing project flats) are more dense. Places like Bangsar may appear to have more voters since the development is horizontal and the spread bigger, but smaller places like Pantai Dalam or Sri Pahang are more compact and dense.”
Bangsar being the exception, low cost or PPR flats cover most of Lembah Pantai, with the remaining areas filled up by pockets of small landed residential neighbourhoods or Malay squatters.
The majority of households there are Malays, which form over half of the seat’s 72,386 registered voters. The seat’s middle and upper class are mostly Chinese and Indians, each making up around a fifth of the electorate. A small number of them, however, can also be found in the flats.
In 2008 and 2013 Nurul Izzah, won Lembah Pantai with an average majority of 1,900 votes, which indicated significant support for the young MP among the B40 Malay voters.
Fahmi, who worked as Nurul Izzah’s political secretary for almost two terms before his appointment as PKR communication’s director two years ago, believed the incumbent MP’s perseverance in serving the constituency despite the lack of funding helped build trust.
Some of the Lembah Pantai B40 Malay voters Malay Mail polled attested to this, saying they saw Nurul Izzah frequently there while some also said they have received direct assistance.
“I see her quite regularly around here and I think most residents are more or less satisfied with her performance,” said a resident from Sri Sentosa, a predominantly working class neighbourhood at the southern edge of Lembah Pantai.
“We know her very well… I think most people here see her quite regularly,” said another resident by the name of Faisal, owner of a small stall selling coconut water.
Broken lifts, underemployment
Like in most PPR or low cost flats, voters mostly want immediate solutions to both structural and local problems.
Fahmi said youth unemployment in Lembah Pantai is high and many larger and poorer households have single lowly-paid breadwinners, making it tougher to cope with KL’s escalating cost of living.
But while it is natural to assume that a growingly sophisticated urban electorate like those in Lembah Pantai have lofty expectations like reform, these voters also want more than just pledges for more jobs or a commitment to fighting corruption.
MPs must also be able to provide tangible solutions to immediate problems, which typically means repairing broken facilities or are cash-ready to fund their hospital or clinic bills.
“Imagine you have a grandmother who has to climb up the stairs all the way to the 20th floor because the lifts are broken,” Fahmi said.
“These are usually the things they want solutions to.”
Lembah Pantai is one of the 10 Federal Territories (FT) seats within Kuala Lumpur. There are 12 in total, one being Putrajaya, the other Labuan in Sabah. Constituencies under the FT fall under the purview of the federal government, and KL is under the administration of the federally-funded Kuala Lumpur City Council (DBKL).
