Is the 2013 Budget Najib’s “silver bullet” to win the 13th GE?

After the presentation of the 2013 Budget by the Prime Minister cum Finance Minister, Datuk Seri Najib Razak in Parliament last Friday, the Deputy Prime Minister, Tan Sri Muhyiddin Yassin praised the 2013 budget as “the best to date”, and such superlative praises have been taken up by the other Barisan Nasional leaders.

Muhyiddin also denied that the 2013 Budget is an “election budget”. No MP whether from Barisan Nasional or Pakatan Rakyat would agree with him. In fact, I don’t think Muhyiddin himself believes his own denial.

But whether the 2013 Budget will be remembered by Umno/BN leaders as “the best budget” in the past 55 years will depend on whether it is the “silver bullet” for Najib to win the 13th General Election with a two-thirds parliamentary majority or whether it would result in his becoming the last UMNO Prime Minister or a prelude for him to be toppled as UMNO President and Prime Minister in a repeat scenario like what happened to Tun Abdullah in 2009 – becoming the latest “trophy” of Tun Mahathir who would have the scalps of three DPMs and two PMs in the bag!

It is precisely because Najib has no confidence that the 2012 Budget, despite giving goodies for almost every sector of the electorate, would be the “silver bullet” that he has kept postponing the dissolution of Parliament and acquired the dubious record of being the Prime Minister without an elected mandate of his own for the longest period when compared to all the previous four Prime Ministers after Tunku Abdul Rahman, including his father Tun Razak, Tun Hussein Onn, Tun Mahathir and Tun Abdullah.

It is also because of this signal lack of confidence that he made dubious history in transforming the 2013 Budget into a brazen electioneering speech.

Najib took MPs and the listening public by surprise when he devoted the first six paragraphs of his 2012 Budget speech appealing to Malaysians for continued electoral support for Umno/BN government after 55 years, and hurled charges and insinuations against Pakatan Rakyat.

But he outdid himself at the end of his budget speech when he devoted the last 14 paragraph of his 174-paragraph budget speech on an unashamed glorification of UMNO/BN rule and condemned Pakatan Rakyat, causing many to shake their heads with the common complaint that the 2013 Budget presentation was a poor reflection on the “class” and “standard” both on the Prime Minister-cum-Finance Minister as well as on the annual budget.

It is evident that the 2013 Budget presentation hid a very unconfident Najib who is haunted and hounded by the phobia that his fourth budget speech as Finance Minister may be the last Umno/BN budget in Parliament in the nation’s history.

This is why despite all the chest-thumping and braggadocio of supreme confidence that Malaysia will witness six more budgets to be tabled by the Umno/BN Government to transform Malaysia from middle to a high-income developed country, Najib has continued to play the role of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, “To Be or Not To Be”, agonizing over whether “To dissolve or not to dissolve Parliament” since last year.

In the conclusion of the 2013 Budget presentation, Najib said:

“We are aware that there are parties requesting to be given a chance to form the next Government. In a democratic country, we understand that they too have their rights. It is the rakyat who ultimately decides who will be given the mandate through the ballot box.”

Although the Prime Minister conceded that it is within the rights of political parties in a democracy to seek to be given a chance to form the next Government and that it is the rakyat who ultimately decides who will be given the mandate through the ballot box, the glaring omission was his failure to declare and pledge clearly and unequivocally that he would personally ensure and facilitate a peaceful transition of federal power for the first time in the nation’s history if this is the verdict of the electorate through the ballot box – to tell the world that Malaysia has become a normal democracy, a basic condition to become, in Najib’s own words, “the best democracy in the world”!

I had in fact posed this question to the Prime Minister many times in the past three years, but he has declined to break his silence despite his infamous speech of UMNO defending Putrajaya at all cost “even if our bodies are crushed and our lives lost”, raising the question whether he and UMNO really want Malaysia to be the “world’s best democracy”.

In normal democracies, whether the United Kingdom, European Union countries, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, the United States or even in Japan, none of their citizens would doubt that there would be peaceful transition of power from one political party or political coalition to another, whether at the national or state level, if this is the verdict of the electorate in a general election.
But this is not the case in Malaysia. In fact, we are still a very long way from being a normal democracy, when even the Prime Minister, the Cabinet Ministers, UMNO and all the component Barisan Nasional parties are still not prepared to make a clear and unequivocal commitment for a peaceful transition of federal power if this is the decision of the electorate in the next general election!

Najib cannot delay any further in making a public commitment to accept and facilitate a peaceful transition of federal power in the next general election if this is the verdict of the electorate or he would be proving right the recent description of him as a “false democrat” who “hold elections but have no intention of giving up power”.

(Speech 2 on the 2013 Budget on Thursday, October 4, 2012)