'Pakatan must use rise in support to heal wounds'
MalaysiaKini.com
Oct 21, 2014

DAP parliamentary leader Lim Kit Siang has urged Pakatan Rakyat to use a survey showing that support has risen for Pakatan to recover from "self-inflicted wounds" sustained in the Selangor MB crisis.

This, he said, can only be done if all three component parties adhere to the agreed upon common policy framework, and work on a basis consensus.

"The reaffirmation of these two basic principles of Pakatan will take the coalition to greater heights while their denial will dispatch Pakatan to the dustbin of history," he said in a statement today.

Lim (left) was referring to the Universiti Malaya Center for Democracy and Electoral Studies (Umcedel) survey, which found that support for Pakatan rose from 35 percent in May to 48 percent in September.

The rise follows a plummet of support by 15 percent in May, as the Selangor crisis worsened.

The crisis caused fissures within the coalition when PAS refused to endorse PKR's sole candidate PKR president Dr Wan Azizah Wan Ismail as menteri besar.

Selangor PKR chief Azmin Ali eventually replaced Abdul Khalid Ibrahim as MB on Sept 23.

The September survey was conducted three days after Azmin was sworn-in.
 
'Selangor BN too weak'

Meanwhile, Lim said the saving grace of the worst Pakatan crisis in its six-year existence was that Selangor BN was “too weak” to exploit the Selangor MB crisis to its advantage.  
 
“(This is because) they have no confidence whatsoever that they stood any chance of winning back the Selangor state government if a Selangor state general election was held.”
 
Lim said that this is especially evident in the two surveys Umcedel conducted in May and September, which showed BN support plunging from 25 percent in May to another drop of five percentage points in September.
 
“It also revealed that 48 percent of those polled said they wanted PAS to remain in Pakatan while only 19 percent wanted the Islamist party to break away and another 22 percent were unsure.”
 
He said the Umcedel surveys proved how Pakatan stood for “the new future politics of hope and justice, while BN represents discredited politics of the past”.
 
Conversely, research firm Politweet.org, claimed that interest in Pakatan from Facebook users had fallen to a record low of 10 percent, while BN had increased its share of interest to 31 percent.
 
The chart (below) shows the partisanship of political party interest on Facebook from potential voters, from January 2013 to October 2014. 
 
The firm’s finding showed that Pakatan-only interest had reduced by 400,000 users while BN-only interest had increased by 200,000 users.  
 
The statistics cover Facebook users aged 21 years and older residing in Malaysia. Measurement of interest includes users who share content about the party and members of supporter groups, party pages and party workers.

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