KUALA LUMPUR, March 12 ― Umno veteran Tan Sri Tengku Razaleigh Hamzah wants his party to end its partnership with PAS under the Muafakat Nasional (MN) banner and go all out to take back the seats and states won by the Islamist party at the next general election.
The Gua Musang MP told The Malaysian Insight that PAS cannot be trusted and cited his past experience with the Islamist party when he was with another party called Semangat 46 ― now defunct ― to justify why Umno should stop its political cooperation.
“We have always fought PAS. The party has been a pain since inception in 1951.
“PAS has been troubling Umno since. Even today, they are troubling Umno. It’s nothing new,” he was quoted saying.
The Kelantan prince also called Ku Li raised the 2019 by-elections in Tanjung Piai and Semenyih to further justify his antipathy to PAS, even though both seats were eventually won by the Umno-led Barisan Nasional.
“Even in Tg Piai, when they were already with us, they did not vote for us.
“PAS has about 3,000 members in Tg Piai but not even 1,000 of them voted for us. They are not trustworthy allies. Not even in Semenyih.
“PAS is like a prostitute, going back and forth between DAP and Semangat 46,” he told the news portal.
Tengku Razaleigh who founded Semangat 46 in 1988 after losing the Umno party election to Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad had formed an alliance with PAS under the Angkatan Perpaduan Ummah banner for the 1990 general election. He subsequently returned to Umno after Semangat 46 dissolved in 1996.
He asserted that there were two main reasons Umno lost Terengganu to PAS in Election 1990, one of them being then Umno president Datuk Seri Najib Razak.
“The reason why we lost Terengganu to PAS was because Najib, at the last minute and without consulting anyone else, agreed to three-cornered fights.
“But that puts Umno at a disadvantage as it has to fight everyone else. As a result we lost more seats and PAS benefited,” Tengku Razaleigh was quoted as saying.
The second reason, he said was because Terengganu voters viewed PAS as the more religious party and chose to support it.
“They looked at PAS and decided to vote for it because they were sympathetic to religious organisations and that was how PAS got Terengganu. And also because of the little mistake we had made,” he added.
PAS has over the years formed political partnerships with unlikely partners when it was in the Opposition, and its most recent inclusion in the Bersatu-led Perikatan Nasional (PN) is the first that has enabled it to be part of the federal ruling coalition.
Umno and PAS teamed up and formed MN in September 2019 under an agreement of political cooperation to counter the Pakatan Harapan (PH) coalition that had won the 14th general election a year prior.
To Tengku Razaleigh, an Umno-PAS relationship cannot be sustained, which is why he believes his party should end its current cooperation and work to reclaim its parliamentary and state seats.
“We cannot agree because you cannot have half-baked strategies where you accept three-cornered fights here and straight fights there.
“I advocate that we fight PAS [in the next elections],” he was quoted saying.
Tengku Razaleigh has been reported to favour a tie-up between Umno and current political foe, PH, to go against Bersatu and PAS in the 15th general election.
