THE job that PKR president Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim has coveted for decades may yet be within his grasp, if his latest claim that he has the numbers comes through.
But it will not be the first time he has made such a claim. The previous one was in September 2008 when Tun Abdullah Ahmad Badawi was prime minister.
While he insisted that he would be sworn in as the new prime minister on Malaysia Day that year, he never revealed how many MPs would cross the floor to give him the necessary support to topple Abdullah’s government.
It was not a good time for Abdullah. In the general election just six months earlier, he had lost the two-thirds majority that Barisan Nasional (BN) had been so accustomed to.
Political tension was high after the government had a political blogger, a journalist and an opposition politician arrested under the Internal Security Act.
At that time, the Opposition led by Anwar had 82 seats in the Dewan Rakyat, still 30 short of the number to make a simple majority.
Had he succeeded, it would have been a remarkable comeback. Anwar had been the anointed successor to long-serving prime minister Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad until they fell out and Anwar was sacked, subsequently convicted of sodomy and jailed in 1998.
Fast forward to the 2018 general election. This time, Anwar and Mahathir were a team. Their coalition, Pakatan Harapan (PH) unseated BN which was then led by Datuk Seri Najib Abdul Razak.
According to Anwar, a deal was struck among the parties in PH that entailed Mahathir handing over power to him within two years. However, the PH government fell before that timeline was up.
