With Zaid's exit a PKR splinter party to emerge soon...

Now that Zaid Ibrahim has withdrawn from the race for PKR deputy president and quit all posts in the party, expect a new opposition party to be formed. This party will canvas the support of the discontented from among the Dayaks of Sarawak, the Kadazan-Dusun-Murut of Sabah, the Orang Asli in the peninsula, and from Hindraf's more malleable elements, together with those within PKR who feel that the party is in the grip of a cartel.

In short, this new party will try to enlist to its cause all those of the broad middle of Malaysian politics who do not believe that PKR, as it is presently led, is the party of the Malaysian future.

Within months of his joining PKR in the middle of last year, Zaid showed signs that he was going to be refractory. Normally, a new entrant to a political party, however renowned, would bide his time, take the rear seats, find and work a groove until such time his or her industry combines with availing opportunity to rise. But Zaid was not keen on the slow train to the upper echelons of PKR. Despite disavowing any intention to scale up the party's hierarchy, he was borne along on a path of dissidence, as much by his refraction as by the restiveness of members with clout who were frustrated with the perceived failure of supremo Anwar Ibrahim to consolidate PKR. In other words, the situation was rife for schism.

When it seemed increasingly evident that PKR deputy president Dr Syed Husin Ali wasn't interested to defend his position, the die was cast on a contest for the vacant post between long-time aspirant Azmin Ali and party newcomer Zaid. Internecine feuding in the Sabah chapter of PKR in October last year was the earliest signal that a contest for the post of deputy president would cleave the party into factions that would eventuate in a schism. This schism is now on the threshold of becoming reality.

Zaid and Co on the way out

The only way it could have been averted was to prevent a contest for the deputy presidency. But no influential voice in PKR was disposed to anticipate and forestall that possibility. Factions are inevitable in a democratic party. Prudent leadership tends towards co-opting rather than repressing them. Factions must be given just enough aeration to exist but not enough to flout party discipline with impunity. Clear-eyed, flexible and unsanctimonious leadership would navigate this tenuous territory with panache.

Now that Zaid and his cohort are, in all likelihood, on the way out of PKR, the party leadership should take a leaf out of the late PAS president Fadzil Mohd Noor's book. When Parti Keadilan Nasional, PKR's forerunner, was formed in April 1999, Fadzil, a pivotal leader in the history of the Malaysian opposition, welcomed the development as positive for the flourishing of Malaysian democracy.

Now it would help if PKR's present hierarchy emulates Fadzil's attitude at PKN's inception should a new party be formed. It's not on to lament something they could have been foreseen and forestalled but didn't.- Terrence Netto.

source:malaysiakini

The more the merrier and BN will laugh all the way to victory come GE 13......

Latest:

Datuk Zaid Ibrahim, after causing an uproar with his sudden withdrawal from the PKR deputy presidential race this morning, has now pledged to shun the spotlight from now on, lamenting that he was no longer wanted by party leaders.

“I don’t think anyone wants me now,” the dejected-sounding Zaid told The Malaysian Insider this morning.

But the former Umno minister maintained that he would stay on as a PKR member despite his decision to quit the deputy presidential race.

“I will stay on. But that is all I can do for now,” he said. Read here.

cheers.