KUALA LUMPUR, March 14 — DAP needs to be more flexible in its negotiations with other parties when it comes to seat allocations and campaign strategies if they want to avoid a defeat at the next general elections, says Ong Kian Ming.
The DAP MP for Bangi said out of the 40 seats Barisan Nasional (BN) won in Johor, 20 or half were won with less than 50 per cent of the popular votes.
In a statement, he said BN benefitted from the multi-cornered fights among the Opposition who contested for similar seats but in reality, they won less than 45 per cent of the votes.
“In fact, the combined votes of PH (including Muda) and Perikatan Nasional (PN) of approximately 750k outnumbered BN’s votes of approximately 600k by 150k.
“Unfortunately, unlike GE14 where the inclusion of PAS in a multi-corner fight probably helped PH win a few marginal seats in Johor, the presence of a much stronger Bersatu together with PAS in Muhyiddin’s home state helped draw a significant proportion of Malay votes away from PH but not by enough to allow PN to win more seats despite it picking up 24.2 per cent of the popular vote.
“In the end, it was the BN who benefitted this time from the multi-corner fights,” he said.
Ong said in light of the vote splitting, there was little point in “killing each other” but tensions exist between parties like PAS vs DAP, Bersatu vs PKR or between its leaders.
He said Warisan should also rethink their plans to go nationwide and focus only on Sabah again as they too were competing with PH for seats instead of fighting with BN-Umno seats.
Ong also said for GE15 they cannot rely on large ceramahs extolling anti-Najib, anti-1MDB as its platform.
He suggested beefing up their ground operations with a more personal touch by making each candidate’s presence felt among the voters and the candidate’s track record highlighted in a compelling way.
Ong said some supporters may not agree with this method but they need to avoid knee-jerk reactions and not respond to populist sentiments that may go against the long term interests of the party and the country.
“For example, if PH had signed some sort of MOU (memorandum of understanding) with Tan Sri Muhyiddin Yassin last year to keep him as prime minister until 2023, Umno may not have instigated the state elections in Melaka and Johor.
“We would definitely not have an Umno prime minister who is too weak to stand up to Datuk Seri Zahid Hamidi, his president, and Datuk Seri Najib Razak, his former president.
“Being flexible in our approach does not mean we do not have any concrete plans. On the contrary, it means that we have to have multiple concrete plans for different scenarios that may take place,” he added.
BN won 40 state assembly seats with Umno winning 33 state seats, MCA four, and MIC three at the just-concluded Johor polls.
