Commentary: A mistake got ex-Malaysia PM Muhyiddin a sedition charge. Will it cost him a coalition?

KUALA LUMPUR: If you read the transcript of former prime minister Muhyiddin Yassin’s Aug 15 campaign speech, the one that saw him charged with sedition on Tuesday (Aug 27), you would be puzzled.
It wasn’t so much about what he said – seemingly questioning the former king’s decision to not invite him to be sworn in as prime minister after Malaysia’s 2022 general election (GE15), despite claiming to have sufficient backing from parliamentarians.
You would be puzzled because you could not understand why a 77-year-old veteran with over 50 years of political experience would put himself in high political risk with little to gain.
The definitive part of the speech read: “Who was the king at that time? Pahang (referring to former king Sultan Abdullah Sultan Ahmad Shah).”
In a country with deep reverence for its royal institutions – with a Sedition Act kept specifically to protect them – the speech appeared as an amateurish mistake unbecoming of a senior politician. 
Worse, the speech hardly aided his coalition Perikatan Nasional (PN)’s chances at the Nenggiri by-election on Aug 17. In the end, PN lost its state seat to the UMNO candidate by a sizable 3,352 majority.
Unsurprisingly, many parties condemned the speech, and at least 29 police reports were lodged against Muhyiddin.
When Muhyiddin showed up in the Kelantan court, many senior leaders of PN coalition partner Parti Islam Se-Malaysia (PAS) were reportedly nowhere to be found. PAS deputy president Tuan Ibrahim’s criticism against the charge focused more on the use of the colonial-era Sedition Act than the alleged speech itself.
It is not far-fetched to interpret this as a growing divide between Muhyiddin’s Parti Pribumi Bersatu Malaysia (Bersatu) and PAS. PAS is undoubtedly the senior partner of the coalition.
It won the most seats in the previous parliamentary election (58 per cent of PN seats) and six state polls in August 2023 (72 per cent of PN seats).  Its grassroots machinery – volunteers, Unit Amal security and traffic manning, canvassers – is the most mature in the coalition, in addition to committed members and a 70-year-old religious movement.
What Bersatu had to offer PAS were funding, west coast urban appeal and its national leaders. One by one, they have since rapidly eroded. 
Bersatu’s key accounts were seized and frozen by the Malaysia Anti-Corruption Commission in April 2023. Lack of coordination by the opposition also meant that PN seats have not negotiated with the government to receive constituency allocations (RM3.5 million or US$750,000 annually per seat).
In the August 2023 state elections, PAS also realised that it could win on the west coast on its own. In Negeri Sembilan, PAS won three out of PN’s five seats even though it contested fewer seats. It also won in areas not traditionally under its remit like Tangga Batu and Jasin in Melaka.
PAS recognised this, and reflected this in the state executive council distributions, by affording Bersatu only 9 per cent of its share in Kelantan and Terengganu, and 27 per cent and 37 per cent in Kedah and Perlis respectively. The executive councils of the loose administrative coalition of the four states – dubbed the “SG4” – also marginalised Bersatu leaders.
Therefore, the only value-add that Bersatu could still offer to PAS is its national leaders, chiefly Muhyiddin Yassin, Hamzah Zainudin and Azmin Ali. However, this has been severely challenged in the past few months, given the party’s defections, divisions and denigration of leaders’ image.
The six ex-Bersatu parliamentarians who declared their support for Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim kept their seats after Bersatu sacked them, reducing Bersatu’s seats in the lower house to 25. Within the party, Muhyiddin had tried twice to resign as president, only to retract shortly after to protect the party from an internal rupture.
With internal polls coming up in October 2024, Muhyiddin proposed keeping top posts uncontested to avoid a civil war, though this made some party leaders reportedly uneasy.  
Charges against Bersatu leaders including Muhyiddin, information chief Wan Saiful Wan Jan and its division chief cast doubt on Bersatu’s leadership credibility. The leaders’ national profiles are invariably tied more to their popularity than the trial outcome but would still be affected by these charges.
The latest addition of the sedition charge against the Bersatu president should be sufficient to make PAS think twice about the coalition’s continuity.
For PAS, leaving a coalition to go solo is something it is accustomed to doing, as soon as it acknowledges that the coalition partners no longer benefit them, just like how they broke ranks with Pakatan Harapan in 2015 and with UMNO under Muafakat Nasional in 2022.
The only thing holding PAS back is whether it could make up for the leadership gap with its professionals, like Ahmad Samsuri Mokhtar and Syahir Sulaiman, that could prevent it from retracting back to a regional party.
The recent Nenggiri by-election signalled how PAS sees this coalition relationship playing out, even if it lost.
Even though Nenggiri was an incumbent Bersatu seat, PAS parachuted its candidate and sidelined Bersatu’s proposed names. It even dropped the PN logo in favour of its trademark green-and-white.
The end result of a PN breakup or dissolution would be a weakened opposition, making an electoral turnover in the next general election harder than it already is.
James Chai is a political analyst, columnist and the author of Sang Kancil (Penguin Random House).