COMMENT | With Umno withdrawing support for the Muhyiddin Yassin regime, it remains to be seen how many will heed the call by the Umno supreme council to abandon the ship Umno helped build and sink – or will Umno dissolve into a protracted fight for the political and personal survival of certain personalities in the party?

It is karmic, I suppose, that we are in this mess today because Malaysians for decades did not hold their elected representatives accountable for anything. Umno and Barisan National for decades were voted in legitimately by a majority of Malaysians and Harapan could not even muster the political will to cater to the base even while briefly in power.

This farcical reconvening of Parliament in the odious “hybrid” style is just another banal move by the Malay political establishment to maintain the illusion of a democracy, while the trajectory towards totalitarianism remains the same. Umno supreme council giving the go-ahead for Umno MPs to remain in play until Parliament reconvenes gives mercenary MPs some breathing room, and no doubt, all manner of devious and expensive ploys will be carried by the Malay political establishment.

Do not make the mistake of thinking that Perikatan Nasional (PN) is down for the count. This is mainstream Malaysian politics, which means that there is no ideology beyond its supremacist foundations and grand coalitions are merely made up of people seeking to wrest power from usurpers for agendas that have nothing to do with the concerns of the average rakyat.

As reported in the press, BN component parties had earlier rebuffed moves made by former prime minister Najib Abdul Razak and Umno president Ahmad Zahid Hamidi of leaving the PN government. Sources claimed representatives from BN were quoted as saying: "Ahmad Zahid told us that Barisan needed to leave, as he claimed that the Perikatan government is unpopular with the people and that even the Malay Rulers were allegedly not happy.

"We were not convinced.

"One of us told them that even if there were some unpopular figures in the government, that does not mean Barisan ministers are unpopular.

"Najib argued that even if Barisan MPs leave the government, it does not mean the Perikatan government will fall.”

If what is reported in the press is factual, then this is a sad display for the once-mighty Umno, which now has to go hat in hand to organise a betrayal of its own. However, with these latest moves, the country is plunged, yet again, into a political quicksand while the pandemic wreaks havoc on the health system of this country.

The reason why Zahid was perceived as weak had nothing to do with his corruption scandals and everything to do with the once hegemonic Umno bending the knee to Bersatu. The fight between Umno and Bersatu is, in reality, just a fight between current and former Umno members and not some sort of deep ideological fissure.

Of course, the only way to determine if the government is really unpopular with the people is to have an election. And Zahid knows that once there is an election, nobody in Umno will want to concede or compromise with another Malay-based wannabe hegemon.

Of course, at this point, we cannot really know what Umno will do, simply because Umno has lost party discipline and strangely enough – because you would think otherwise, right? – become every man for himself, as long as Muhyiddin keeps handing out goodies. The supreme council may have made a declaration, with the usual caveats of not working with Anwar and the DAP, but the situation remains fluid and the games between Zahid and Muhyiddin are only in half-time.

All this is reflected in the dialectic within Umno now. The numerous divisions within Umno, with various potentates talking out of turn and claiming that either Umno is going to withdraw from PN or Umno will remain in PN and purge “seditionists” from its ranks, define the kind of “opposition” the PN regime was dealing with. Now, of course, we will discover who are the Umno patriots and who are the seditionists.

Meanwhile, Anwar Ibrahim and his cohorts in Harapan have not made a successful blow against this regime on their own, instead, Anwar seems to be relying on the internal schisms within Umno to propel him to the highest office in the land. See how well this is working out for Anwar.

Anwar said that the issue of a new government was not raised with the Agong - "The matter does not arise for now," – the important part is the “for now” bit. This is why you have someone like Wan Saiful Wan Jan from Bersatu demanding “guarantees” that Anwar will not use the recovened Parliament as a means for his own agenda of claiming power, which I suppose is different from Bersatu’s agenda of remaining in power, even though they are a minority party. Poor Wan Saiful! He should have been paying attention to Zahid instead of worrying about Anwar.

Mainstream politics in this country is about deal-making, and God only knows what kind of deals are being made behind the scenes. Now that the Umno supreme council has made its play, it remains to be seen if it can follow through.

This is about making deals. PN will remain or fall, in the kind of deals it makes. The reality is that the rakyat have no idea what kind of deals that Umno, including those who want the PN exit, are willing to make. Prima facie the latest round of inducements in the form of the DPM position and, to a lesser degree, the senior minister position has not had the desired effect but as I said, the game is still early.

All of which is further evidence that this regime survives on the mercenary loyalty of Malay uber alles political operatives and the lack of cohesion of Harapan.