IPOH, May 1 — Ipoh Timur Umno admitted today that Barisan Nasional (BN) has a greater chance of winning the Tebing Tinggi state seat following the redelineation process by the Election Commission (EC).

Its division chief Datuk Azian Osman said the seat will now have thousands more Malay voters following the move, which he said will now benefit BN against DAP candidate Abdul Aziz Bari.

“We have a great potential of winning back Tebing Tinggi after around 12,000 Malay voters were moved to the constituency with the redelineation process.

“And with what Aziz had said about Umno and Zambry, it will helps us more to get the votes as voters will now know that his comments were seditious,” Azian told reporters today.

This comes as Azian brushed off Pakatan Harapan’s candidate Aziz’s claim that the party and its caretaker mentri besar Datuk Zambry Abdul Kadir had neglected the constituency after it was won by an Opposition candidate in 2013.

“Aziz is a ‘parachute’ candidate from Selangor. He does not know what Umno and mentri besar have been doing for the people here. It is wrong for him to give a statement blindly without any proof and proper research,” Azian said.

Aziz made his remark in a ceramah in Tebing Tinggi yesterday, and a video of his speech has since went viral.

“Aziz should take a walk around the constituency. There is a lot of housing developments, the economy of the people improved and the infrastructures also upgraded. These all were done by Barisan Nasional and Zambry, not the Opposition,” Azian said. 

In March, Tindak Malaysia had warned that the EC’s redelineation will result in increased ethnic segregations as it packs different races into different constituencies, especially in Perak where Malay voters were moved to seats held by BN.

It said one notable Perak state seat affected by “racial re-engineering” is Tebing Tinggi, currently held by DAP — which was formerly made up of mostly Chinese voters but has now become a Malay-majority seat.

In 2013, ethnic Chinese voters made up 73 per cent of Tebing Tinggi voters to Malays at 21 per cent. It is now 57 per cent Malays and merely 34 per cent Chinese.

Aziz will face BN’s Tony Khoo Boon Chuan and Mazlan Md Isa from PAS for the seat.