Nurul Izzah said that, whether she wins or loses the contest against Rafizi, she would always consider him a good friend of hers.

“Win or lose, it won’t impact the friendship that we have established after all these years. Rafizi wasn’t just my friend in the past – he’s my friend now and forever,” she said at a campaign event here this evening.

Nurul Izzah and Rafizi are in a one-on-one contest for the PKR deputy presidency, which the latter won in 2022. Nurul Izzah did not take part in the party polls that year and was appointed a party vice-president.

Rafizi has been outspoken and unapologetically confrontational over the past week, training his guns on multiple leaders as he raised what he claimed were recent lapses in party discipline and leadership accountability.

He has not been directly critical of Nurul Izzah but did say that her candidacy had put her father, PKR president Anwar Ibrahim, between a rock and a hard place given the only two possible outcomes of the race for the deputy presidency.

Rafizi said PKR would be accused of practising nepotism if Nurul Izzah was elected PKR deputy president while, if he won, critics would claim Anwar had been rejected by his own party.