LOOKING FOR NEXT COALITION PARTNER?
Not that PAS has a good coalition track record either. In its 75-year history, it has been part of at least 10 coalitions, without lasting more than five years on average. It has worked with almost all the mainstream political parties, including the United Malays National Organisation (UMNO) and Parti Keadilan Rakyat (PKR).
Its current coalition, PN, is already one of the longest-lasting. It is reasonable to assume that on its sixth-year mark, cracks will show. When that happens, PAS will once again be finding another partner.
This time, PAS senior party leaders are reviving the old dream of partnering with the oldest Malay party, UMNO, once more as part of the Muafakat Nasional accord. UMNO’s youth chief has celebrated this idea, though its highest leadership have given no signals thus far.
Notwithstanding how short-lived the last accord was (barely a year), this green-and-red concept is attractive to both parties. It plays to a highly emotive sentiment among Malay voters of “uniting the ummah”. A partnership that could unite the two largest Malay-Muslim parties could also unite the Malay-Muslim population and its destiny.
The only problem, of course, is that this is highly impractical for the fundamental reason that PAS and UMNO compete for the same Malay-majority seats. At the same time, both party leaders do not intend to share the leadership position with the other; both parties also believe that they are on the ascend and would one day seek to dominate the rest.
PAS and UMNO both have grounds to believe these, even though both realities cannot be true at the same time. To some extent, both parties know this. That is why they have never formalised a coalition beyond high-level narrative cooperation.
https://www.channelnewsasia.com/commentary/malaysia-election-anwar-pas-bersatu-tension-umno-5846061
