Only Straight Fights can Defeat BN: NGO

KUALA LUMPUR: The Human Rights Party (HRP) believes the ruling Barisan National (BN) government can only be ousted if every opposition party in the country combines and works with each other in the next elections.

Convinced by this, its Central Committee Member, N. Ganesan said three-cornered fights would only simply work in favour of the BN, pointed out three-way contests in the 13^th General Elections would “only mean maintaining status quo at best or very likely an even greater loss to the opposition.”

“The opposition must now all unite on one objective – get BN out. Everyone with that primary objective must begin talking to each other to resolve their areas of differences. “It will not help that at this stage we remain stubborn and unmoving. Wisdom must prevail. Everyone must give some, so as to achieve the greater goal and make a larger more inclusive coalition happen to beat the BN,” he said, in a statement.

According to him, without mentioned SAPP, a formidable coalition that BN will find almost impossible to beat will be PKR-DAP-PAS-BUF-HRP-MCLM-KITA.

If Pakatan Rakyat hopes to make it to Putrajaya and its (de-facto leader) Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim the Prime Minister, there is no choice but to make this new alliance happen and become more inclusive and broaden the policy platform to include the interests of the others and reflect it in the inclusion of new partners,” Ganesan said.

Stressing the weakness of three-cornered fights for the opposition, he said the probability of a BN win goes up significantly in such contests, citing the recent Batu Sapi by-election as an example.

“The majority in Batu Sapi went up to 6,359 in this by-election compared to 3,708 in 2008.” “The additional mud that gets flung by both the opposition candidates on each other increases the total mud they get, on top of the stuff that will already be flung at them by the BN. So some voters will likely shift on account of this too to BN.”

Swing votes may not matter much in constituencies in a direct contest where there has been no major issues in the constituencies and where the margin in the previous election was large, Ganesan said, adding swing votes would, however, make a difference in a direct contest where the margin was small in the previous elections.

“The voting pattern clearly suggests that the behaviour of the voters in Batu Sapi had remained stable.”

“In this three-cornered fight, the votes to the two opposition candidates clearly do not appear to have come from BN’s vote bank. Rather the two opposition candidates just split the votes already in the opposition bank.”

“See that the 5,771 votes received by the Independent opposition candidate in 2008 just split to the PR (3,414) and SAPP (2,031) for a total 5,445 with a small loss of 306 to BN,” he pointed out, adding the total of voters remained stable – 15,250 in 2008 compared to 15,218 in 2010.