Recently, UMNO leaders are exuding supreme confidence, at least to the public, about the 13th General Elections.
UMNO information chief Datuk Ahmad Maslan for instance has declared that the Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Razak has halted the “political tsunami” of 2008 with his various transformation pledges and programmes since April 2009.
He said: “In 2008, we were worried of the ‘political tsunami’ but in 2013, I am confident it has ended.”
It was also Ahmad who last month expressed confidence that the Barisan Nasional would wrest back 20 parliamentary seats held by Pakatan Rakyat to secure two-thirds parliamentary majority in the 13GE – retaining the 140 parliamentary seats it won and capture five of the 23 seats held by PAS, five of 29 held by DAP and 10 of the 31 PKR seats.
The question that immediately comes to mind is why Najib keeps vacillating about the 13th general elections date if the UMNO leadership is so supremely confident about halting the political tsunami of 2008 and regain its two-thirds parliamentary majority – not to mention winning back all the five states lost to Pakatan Rakyat in the 2008 general elections?
Is the UMNO leadership really so confident about UMNO/BN prospects in the 13GE?
A supreme test of UMNO confidence that the 2008 tsunami has been halted is for Najib to declare that UMNO/BN would accept the verdict of voters including change of government in Putrajaya.
This is a question which I had repeatedly posed to Najib inside and outside Parliament in the past four years, but which he had studiously avoided – completely out of character with his declaration that he wants Malaysia to be the “world’s best democracy” as it highlights his refusal to accept the most basic sine qua non for a normal democracy, viz a two-party or two-coalition system and the peaceful and democratic alternation of power based on the verdict of the people in the ballot box.
Now that UMNO declares supreme confidence in having ended the “tsunami of 2008” as to wrest back 20 parliamentary seats from Pakatan Rakyat and to regain two-thirds parliamentary majority, is Najib prepared to make a clear-cut and unequivocal declaration that UMNO and BN would accept the electoral verdict of the Malaysian voters in the 13GE, including a change of federal power in Putrajaya?