THERE will be many flustered faces in Parti Pribumi Bersatu Malaysia today – a day after the PAS president Abdul Hadi Awang thumbed his nose at the nascent political party and called it “directionless and without clear leaders”.

That snub by Hadi was meant to hurt and humiliate, and the smack down will be particularly painful for  Muhyiddin Yassin and others in Bersatu who were confident that months of back channel discussions with PAS leaders would lead to an electoral pact between the Islamist party and Bersatu with Umno as the common enemy.

All those hours of meetings will now amount to nothing.

Now, if only Bersatu leaders had paid attention to Dr Mahathir Mohamad. Having studied Hadi at close quarters for more than three decades and watched his Umno-friendly language since of late, the former prime minister believed that his party was being strung along.

He believed that the PAS president had no intention of working with the opposition and would choose to go it alone in the 14th general election (GE14) – a path that would result in three-cornered contests which will split the opposition vote.

But reluctantly Dr Mahathir went along with the wishes of his party to continue negotiations with PAS, knowing that Bersatu needed to leverage on PAS’s superior network in the Malay heartland.

Also, there was a sense that Muhyiddin had the stature to cobble together an agreement with Tuan Ibrahim Tuan Man and other senior PAS leaders to prevent overlapping contests between candidates from both parties.

All those hopes are in tatters with Hadi now saying that PAS does not want to have any ties with Bersatu.

Bersatu supreme council member Dr Faiz Na’aman bristled at Hadi’s comments.

“There have been three meetings so far with PAS representatives but certain senior leaders appear to want the talks to fail. But we know that the grassroots members themselves want relations with Bersatu.”

Another Bersatu Supreme Council member Dr Rais Hussin, said he knew that the talks were ongoing even at the grassroots level leading up to the muktamar.

“I know there are discussions going on behind closed doors. Of course Hadi has been shadow playing with us all,” said Rais.

“These days their shadow games are more far more extensive and their acrobatics more complex. So we need to wait till the end of the muktamar to find out where they really stand,” Rais told The Malaysian Insight.

Faiz, however, was blunter, saying that Hadi’s actions reminded him of the days back in 2008, just after GE13, when Umno had courted PAS with the idea of forming “unity governments” comprising Umno and PAS lawmakers to form the Perak and Selangor governments.

Two factions of PAS leaders then emerged, those for the unity government and those against it.

The late PAS leader Nik Abdul Aziz Nik Mat moved PAS closer towards PKR and DAP. But Hadi was in favour of unity government. In the end, Nik Aziz won out.

Times have changed. A little more than a year after Nik Aziz’s death, the charismatic Kelantanese leader’s vision of an opposition-friendly PAS is as good as buried.

Bersatu found that fact out the painful and humiliating way. – April 30, 2017.