NEW Perikatan Nasional (PN) member Gerakan will accept its fate if it is not given any seats to contest in the 15th general election, its president Dominic Lau said.

Instead, it will mobilise all its members to help PN win the election, Lau told The Malaysian Insight.

Realistic about the former Barisan Nasional (BN) party’s chances, Lau said there was not much point in demanding for seats but not winning any.

“If a party demands to contest in 100 seats but ends up losing all of them, what’s the point?

“It is always the party that is most likely to win which gets fielded; it is like using half the resources to achieve the same results,” he said.

Lau said he expected PN to field either a Bersatu or PAS candidate in Malay-majority seats, while a Gerakan candidate will most likely be put in seats with higher percentages of Chinese and Indian voters.

While it was in BN, Gerakan was traditionally allocated 12 parliamentary seats and 33 state seats to contest.

In GE13 in 2013, the party only managed to win one federal seat and three state seats.

In GE14, 2018, it was decimated, failing to win a single seat. This election also ended BN’s six decades of federal rule and ushered in a new coalition government for the first time in Malaysia’s history.

Lau said Gerakan, which joined the PN coalition last month after being unaligned to any bloc since quitting BN in June 2018 after GE14, had not made any requests for seats from the PN leadership.

He said PN has yet to begin seat distributions among its components, which besides Gerakan, are Bersatu, PAS, Sabah-based STAR and Sabah Progressive Party. Umno, which is supporting the PN government until the elections are called, did not join the PN coalition.

Lau said the bad blood between Umno and Bersatu will make avoiding three-cornered fights unavoidable, unless Umno changed its mind and cooperated with PN for GE15.

Lau said Gerakan can offer several candidates in Peninsular Malaysia where the party has a network, but admitted that there will not be many seats for it to contest.

Its stronghold in Penang, for example, was lost to DAP in the 2008 general election.

Gerakan’s influence has waned since that election, and its attempt to test its relevance by contesting as an independent in the Tg Piai by-election in 2019 against BN and Pakatan Harapan ended in failure.

Not opportunists, but still hopeful

Lau said Gerakan still had traction in Simpang Renggam, a parliamentary seat in Johor, which was held by the party’s former secretary-general Liang Teck Meng from 2008 to 2018, when he lost it to Pakatan Harapan’s Maszlee Malik.

Although a largely Malay seat at 57% and with Chinese voters taking up 33%, people there are familiar with Gerakan, and the party has a network among constituents.

“However, if the PN chairman thinks another party should contest the seat, we don’t mind.

“Even if it’s a seat with a significant Chinese population, the candidate does not have to be Chinese. The ultimate goal of all parties in PN is to win the election.

“Gerakan is not an opportunist,” Lau said.

Still, the party aspires to break its “zero-seat” status in Parliament and in state legislative assemblies.

Lau said this is the future direction the party leaders with the membership had decided on, and is also one reason for the decision to join PN.

“While Gerakan is not an opportunist, the ultimate goal of Gerakan’s leadership is to break zero in the next general election,” Lau said.

“Joining PN was a process of careful deliberation. Each level of leadership underwent different stages of considerations.

“There are some who disagree, but at least I did not deceive party members.

“Now after joining PN we are going to test whether our decision to join PN is correct or wrong in the next general election.” – March 13, 2021.