COMMENT | The big pow-wow by the Pakatan Harapan presidential council – I still have no idea what this council does – this Friday will hopefully set a transition date which has dominated Harapan since it took over from the Najib regime. PAS is going wackadoodle with idiotic pronouncements, which means that its leadership command is convulsing at the thought that yet again it has missed out on a chance to make it into the federal government because it chose the extreme path instead of the middle ground. The problem with the saboteurs within Harapan is that they operate in the shadows, never once making the case that there are “better” candidates than the person that the people who voted for Harapan want as the prime minister.

I, for one, am always willing to listen to an outlier argument. Anyone who reads my columns understands that I have chronicled Anwar Ibrahim’s missteps even during the run-up to the historic Harapan win and after, while most partisans were suffering from a hangover. This is what I find most despicable about these saboteurs. The fact that they would derail the whole process and they do it for reasons not based on ideology or principle, but rather because they want to retain or gain power.

Let me be very clear - I have been relentless in my criticisms of his words and deeds. However, I still remain one of the few people who think that Anwar should have his time in the hot seat. The big question is, will Anwar rise to the challenge or will he sink to the depths of those Zaid Ibrahim refers to as – the "supremacists"? The narrative that Anwar is a proxy for the DAP will no doubt be further strengthened if Harapan has the cajones to fix a transition date. The DAP, always mindful that they are a target of agents of the fascist state, will no doubt have to do more genuflecting than normal because they understand that their every move will be used to paint a picture of Chinese dominance in an Anwar regime.

Because of what Dr Mahathir Mohamad and the Umno regime did to him, Anwar will always instinctively demonstrate his racial and religious bona fide, which would make the already toxic political landscape even more inhospitable for centre-leaning political operatives. If political operatives choose to enable Anwar when he is tempted to go down far-right paths, this would only benefit the supremacists.

Unlike the old maverick, Anwar has the weight of expectations of the non-Malay community on his shoulders. The base of Harapan is the non-Malays. Umno/PAS and the saboteurs from Harapan are in a win-win position because if Anwar fulfils or exceeds those expectations, they will use it against him because their base is steeped in racial and religious anxieties which (they are told) only a Malay-based political party can assuage. They will claim that Anwar’s subservience to the non-Malay community is at the expense of the Malay community.

If he disappoints the non-Malay community, then the far-right will win as well. They would spin this as further evidence that a multiracial political party will not be able to survive and the non-Malays were taught a lesson in pinning their hopes on a “Malay” reformist.

And this is an important point. For years, Anwar was getting by on his “reformist” credentials. He never had to prove that he is a reformist because he could always rely on the excuse that he was not in a position to implement his vision. If Harapan fixes a date for him to take over as prime minister, his moves and who he chooses as his transition team will give us an inkling if he is the reformist he claims to be or he is a charlatan his critics have always made him out to be.

While Azmin Ali, with the blessing of the old maverick, gets to tear up in a religious setting and shrug off his alleged sex scandal, Anwar is still dealing with the fallout. Not only that, he really does not have control of his party, which is debilitating for someone who claims to want to change the system. It remains to be seen if, when he is prime minister, Anwar will be able to control his party. After all, political operatives from the Azmin faction have engaged in rank insubordination and destabilised the party. Anwar’s people have engaged in political perfidy and no doubt there will be axes to grind if and when Anwar becomes the big cheese. How exactly is he going to save Malaysia with all this noise around him?

Anwar’s "don’t spook the Malays" narrative is a projection about the perceived lack of (rural) Malay support of the progressive Malay faction of PKR which, ironically, is the panacea for the lopsided policies that have been detrimental to the Malay polity.

Young Malay leaders, some of whom have jumped on the bandwagon, citing “ultra-liberal Malays” and other such nonsense, are merely reacting to the right-wing elements in PKR and Bersatu who are jostling for power in this post-May 9 reality. When Rafizi Ramli said that Anwar has to make the hard choices which may even go against his own coalition, we have to wonder if Anwar is capable of making those hard choices. Even Rafizi, a shrewder political operative than most give him credit for, succumbed to an onslaught of the far-right, which his “ultra-liberal” tirade in defence of Deputy Prime Minister Dr Wan Azizah Wan Ismail earned.

Anwar has to change the narrative because the Malay uber alles tactic will always be a losing gambit for him and his party. The far-right wants to trap him in this narrative. What they are deathly afraid of is that he will change the narrative and, if the economy is moving along under his watch, this would be a paradigm-shifting moment in Malaysian politics.

Zaid Ibrahim wrote: “This strong desire to remove Anwar and DAP is simply because both of them, unlike the supremacists, believe in democracy. Both Anwar and DAP will defend democracy until the end.”