SHOULD the Pakatan Harapan (PH) press the panic button following its defeat in the just-concluded Semenyih state by-election, the second in a row for the ruling coalition?
The ballots of military and police personnel, the first to be tallied, showed that almost two-thirds of these civil servants had voted for Barisan Nasional (BN).
This begs the question: why do civil servants remain BN’s vote bank and what message do they want to convey to the PH government?
If anything, the result of the by-election confirmed what analysts warned PH, and what Umno leaders bragged, that the “spirit of Camerons” would take Umno to victory in Semenyih. In other words, they replicated in Semenyih what they did in the Cameron Highlands by-election, with PAS support.
The result showed that even if PH had garnered all the votes that went to PSM and the independent candidate had it been a straight fight, BN would still have won.
The outcome was quite similar to the 2008 general election in which BN won the seat with a 1,140-vote majority.
This time around, its candidate Zakaria Hanafi polled 19,780 votes to beat PH’s Muhammad Aiman Zainali — who garnered 17,866 votes — with a majority of 1,914 votes.
According to a commentary by Sin Chew Daily today, BN’s victory could be attributed to several factors, including the ripple effect of the Cameron Highlands parliamentary election, in which BN won with the help of PAS.
Contrary to what PH expected, the voters had also voted according to party and not candidates. PH’s intention to woo young voters, who comprise 45% of the electorate, with a young candidate proved ineffective.
