KUALA LUMPUR – Barisan Nasional (BN) candidates contesting in the Melaka election will have to sign a statutory declaration (SD) and other agreements when submitting their candidacy papers this Sunday.
Malay daily Sinar Harian reported the coalition’s deputy president Datuk Seri Mohamad Hasan as saying 28 contestants are in the final phases of submitting their SDs, as well as other arrangements to ensure loyalty.
“This will act as a reminder that once you have won (your seat), you cannot easily (party) hop.”
In recent years, Malaysia’s political stability has been threatened and derailed multiple times by nefarious lawmakers hopping across the divide as they see fit – similar to a bunch of frogs running a marathon.
It first began after Pakatan Harapan’s (PH) historical victory over then ruling BN, where many Umno state and federal lawmakers had abandoned their party in favour of the then newly formed Bersatu founded by two-time prime minister Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad.
However, the canny Dr Mahathir finally met his match when he was outfoxed last year during the Sheraton Move.
The backdealings saw Bersatu’s own president Tan Sri Muhyiddin Yassin leading another faction against Dr Mahathir together with Datuk Seri Mohamed Azmin Ali’s faction – who had abandoned PKR – and they opted to form a new federal government with PAS and Umno, collapsing the PH federal administration.
The trend of instability and party hopping continued with the fall of the Warisan-led Sabah government where members of then chief minister (CM) Datuk Seri Mohd Shafie Apdal’s administration left him high and dry, joining former CM Tan Sri Musa Aman.
Refusing to back down, Shafie had taken the battle against those who seek to usurp his administration back to the streets for a state-wide poll that saw a fledgling Perikatan Nasional (PN) taking Kota Kinabalu from the PH-friendly Warisan in September last year.
Unfortunately for Umno, despite winning the highest number of seats in Sabah for PN, its CM candidate Datuk Seri Bung Moktar Radin was sidelined in favour of Bersatu’s Datuk Seri Hajiji Md Noor.
In retaliation, Umno members in Perak staged a coup in December last year against Bersatu’s Menteri Besar Datuk Seri Ahmad Faizal Azumu with members of the DAP opposition, ousting Faizal in favour of Umno’s Datuk Seri Saarani Mohamad.
The latest round of instability had hit Melaka when its former CM Datuk Seri Idris Haron – then Umno – led three other state assemblymen to declare that they no longer support incumbent CM Datuk Seri Sulaiman Md Ali.
This led to Governor Tun Mohd Ali Rustam dissolving the Melaka assembly. – The Vibes, November 5, 2021
