What kind of deputy president should Izzah be for her father?
by R.Dineskumar
Nurul Izzah Anwar has been elected the PKR deputy president, further solidifying the notion that the party is a family party - or a Madani party - Ma (mama) Da (daddy) Ni (Nurul Izzah).
To completely discount nepotism as a factor behind Izzah’s meteoric rise in the party would be wrong. There is no doubt that she would never achieve these accomplishments without having the Anwar surname. Even Nurul Izzah herself is aware of this.
However, at the same time, it would be wrong to say that Izzah is where she is now simply for being Anwar’s daughter. To her merit, she is someone who has been with the Reformasi movement since her teen years. Additionally, as a politician, she is known to be a policy-centric one who is passionate about issues that matter to the people, such as multidimensional poverty, improving the education system (particularly TVET), women's rights, and tackling climate change.
As the party’s former elections director for the 2018 general elections (GE14), Izzah helped PKR clinch 47 seats, the highest number of seats won by the party in its history.
She is not your average “nepo kid” who simply enters politics with zero experience or contributions to the party and latches onto it like a parasite just because their parents are part of the party’s establishment.
Izzah has done a lot for her party and the country throughout her lawmaking career. Therefore, as hard as it is to digest the truth, there is some degree of merit in her taking on the PKR's No. 2 position.
Izzah's contributions to her party are exactly why I am not really bothered much about her being PKR's deputy president. What I am really bothered about is: What kind of deputy president should she be for Anwar?
To answer this question, let us look at Anwar’s track record in the past and the present.
Before taking on the mantle as Malaysia's ninth prime minister, Anwar was known as a politician who would not hesitate to forsake his principles in order to venture into risky political overtures that very often backfire.
This is a man who passionately fought against anti-hopping practices, but does not hesitate to commit similar attempts to save his political career. Take the examples of Anwar’s failed move in 2008 to get several Barisan Nasional MPs to defect to Pakatan Rakyat to form a government; as well as his embarrassing move in 2020, where he claimed that he had a "convincing, formidable and strong" majority of MPs needed to form the next government, without even revealing the exact number of parliamentarians who back him. We all know how it ended.
Additionally, Anwar is also the kind of politico who would not think twice to betray his party comrades for his political expediency. Take the failed 2014 Kajang Move, for example, which backfired spectacularly as Azmin Ali, instead of Anwar, ended up being the next Selangor menteri besar following the ouster of Khalid Ibrahim.
As prime minister, Anwar has proven himself to be capable of discarding his reformist ideals by having a deputy prime minister who was tainted in court cases, keeping the chief commissioner of the Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission (MACC), who himself is tainted in a share ownership scandal and whose agency appears to be dragging on the alleged graft scandal is faced by the Sabah state government.
Frogs from Perikatan Nasional are allowed to stay longer as government backbenchers, despite having clearly flouted the anti-hopping laws.
Under his tenure, institutional reforms seem to have been kept on the back burner, triggering buyers’ remorse among ardent Pakatan Harapan supporters. Even worse, the Madani government is pandering to the Malay conservatives with conservative policy-making that is turning off non-Malay voters towards PKR and PH.
Reformasi appears to be dead, and Reformati is trending online.
The problem facing Izzah: her own father
Anwar has forsaken his reformist principles for the sake of prolonging his political career. This is a problem that Izzah is facing as she takes on the mantle of the PKR deputy president.
Therefore, I would expect Izzah to be the deputy president who would remind Anwar of his reformist roots as well as the reform pledges made to the people in combating cronyism, corruption and societal ills.
She needs to be outspoken in calling out the wrongs committed by the Madani government led by his father, as the political survival of PKR and PH in the next general elections (GE16) hinges on the current government stating true on its reform pledges as well as addressing the people’s socioeconomic woes.
Izzah needs to be the deputy president who would warn Anwar against continuously steering the party and the government to the right to appease Malay conservatives who will always vote for Perikatan Nasional and remind him to stick true to the PKR’s ideals of multiculturalism.
Additionally, Izzah needs to act as an advisor to Anwar, who would advise him against undertaking any political manoeuvres in the future that would damage his ties with his party comrades as well as those in PH.
PKR, fresh off last week’s central leadership elections, is in a fractured state. It simply could not afford to take on more risky manoeuvres from its leadership that would rip the party further apart. As a deputy, Izzah would need to ensure that the interests of all factions in the party are well taken care of, in terms of seat allocations for GE16 and roles in the party’s central leadership for the 2025-2028 term via appointed roles.
I recalled her predecessor, Rafizi Ramli, said that Anwar needed a deputy who was aggressive and effective in carrying out his duties. This, he said, included contributing ideas even when those ideas contradicted the president’s stand.
“That is exactly the role a deputy president has to play, not someone who is a yes-man,” he said in a debate with Saifuddin Nasution Ismail when both of them were vying for the PKR’s No. 2 position in the 2022 central leadership elections
However, it remains questionable whether Rafizi excelled in his job as the deputy president, given Anwar’s present trajectory as PMX.
But now, the ball is in Izzah’s court, and whether or not she will steer her father and PKR to be right path is something that observers need to focus on, instead of obsessing over the fact that whether her ascension in PKR is driven by nepotism.
And I wish her all the best in her new role in PKR.
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