By Terence Netto

Wong Chen, a three-term MP for PKR, who lost in the recent party elections, is taking a short vacation from politics to mull his future.

As well he might.

Among a coterie of technocrats who joined PKR in the flush of its success in GE12 in March 2008, Wong Chen was attracted to the promise radiated by Rafizi Ramli.

Rafizi was the bright young technocratic star of the party whose flair for numbers and ability to unravel corrupt schemes in the Umno-led federal government augured well for PKR’s rise in Malaysian politics.

As Rafizi ascended the party hierarchy, Wong hitched his star to his wagon, a fidelity that obscured for him the dross that floated in his mentor’s wake.

During his rise, Rafizi leveraged his close ties to figurehead party president, the ineffectual Dr Wan Azizah Ismail, to put the faction allied to rival Azmin Ali at a big disadvantage.

This generated the usual quotient of fissures a political party like PKR is heir to.

The cracks led to breaking point so that when Azmin and his faction in late February 2020 joined the Bersatu-led federal government of Muhyiddin Yassin, the schism seemed wholly predictable, in retrospect.

No matter.

Wong must have felt the Rafizi-led faction, of which he was a part, was on the right side of history.

When Pakatan Harapan, of which PKR is core-component, emerged with the largest number of seats in GE15 in November 2022, Wong surely judged his reading of history to be accurate.

However, he could not have foreseen that, in the two-and-a-half years of PH’s ascendancy to the top in federal governance, supremo Anwar Ibrahim would turn out to be a slouch on institutional and economic reform of the Malaysian polity, reforms that are the very reason for PKR’s existence.

And now that the Rafizi faction has been ousted from the central levers of party power, Wong, who does not envisage PKR doing well in GE16 due by February 2028, finds himself left high and dry.

Latest reports say Anwar surrogates in PKR’s Subang division, of which he is chief, want him to re-align himself with the forces that triumphed in the party’s polls or else call it quits.

The latter course would be unlikely, for Wong has said PKR’s backbenchers should now exert pressure for reform.

That, too, is unlikely because the party polls have empowered a new line-up of Anwar proxies that will be more than subservient.

Perhaps Wong Chen will spend his time-out lamenting why he did not put a restraining hand on Rafizi, when, in the pomp of his ascendancy in PKR, he cared little for the possibility that the day would come when the boot is on the other foot.

Terence Netto is a senior journalist and an FMT reader.

The views expressed are those of the writer and do not necessarily reflect those of FMT.