SHAHRIL Sufian Hamdan, the UMNO information chief when Datuk Seri Najib Razak was prime minister and UMNO president, said a couple of days ago on the popular podcast Keluar Sekejap that he sensed his former party's upward trajectory since the Johor elections in July and the Negeri Sembilan elections in August had stalled.
Or, the word he used was "discontinuity" in the trajectory.
UMNO won Johor easily and, together with other minor parties, won a two-thirds majority in Negeri Sembilan.
But, despite the doom and gloom surrounding Prime Minister Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim's ruling Pakatan Harapan coalition, it does seem that UMNO and its coalition, Barisan Nasional's flight path has run into severe air turbulence.
The reason, as Shahril speculated, was because of the unintended consequences of the house arrest given to the convicted ex-PM Datuk Seri Najib Razak instead of letting him serve out his sentence in prison over the 1MDB scandal.
Further, the constitutional crisis ongoing in Negeri Sembilan, caused by UMNO's thus far thwarted attempts to throw out the constitutional monarch Tuanku Muhriz Tuanku Munawir, has made them appear treacherous and untrustworthy, because, since its inception 80 years ago, one of the party's core pillars was upholding the constitutional monarchy.
In fact, it would seem that UMNO has betrayed four (if not all five) of the Rukun Negara, Malaysia's national ideology and pledge, introduced on August 31, 1970, to foster unity and harmony following the May 13 racial riots of 1969.
The core of the Rukun Negara consists of five guiding principles:
1. Belief in God
2. Loyalty to the King and Country
3. Supremacy of the Constitution
4. Sovereignty of the Law; and
5. Courtesy and Morality
UMNO’s conduct in Negeri Sembilan and its role in Najib’s partial pardon does demonstrate that principles two to five have certainly been trampled on and discarded.
And it's all because of hubris — the same reason they lost the general election in 2018 after being in power for 61 years since Independence.
History has shown that hubris always results in power that is ephemeral (fleeting). And nothing depicts this better than the frequently quoted 1818 poem by Percy Bysshe Shelley, Ozymandias.
“I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert.
Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
The tragic fall of powerful civilisations, of powerful men and of powerful organisations is a theme common in history and in literature.
Umno has done well since its formation in 1946. But Umno is nothing exceptional when compared to the great civilisations and governments which have gone into oblivion and become, at best, footnotes in history.
The unremarkable performance of Anwar’s unity government since the end of 2022 gave UMNO a resurrection or a boost from frustrated voters, mostly young and impressionable.
But UMNO has not used this reboot to show Malaysians that its 2018 defeat and eight years on the periphery have changed it.
No, they showed in record time after the Johor and Negeri Sembilan polls that they have not changed at all. If anything, they are worse. – September 20, 2026
Datuk Seri Kalimullah Hassan is the chairman of ECM Libra Foundation and a former NSTP group editor-in-chief
