Already reeling from the effects of the fallout between party president Najib Razak and former strongman Dr Mahathir Mohamad, there is a critical need to show party unity.
This also means that the deputy president’s post, something which had been fought in Umno with as much fervour as the number one post, should not be contested.
Such a call had already been made by Supreme Council member Mohamed Nazri Aziz, amid the repeatedly denied speculation of a rift between Ahmad Zahid Hamidi and Hishammuddin Hussein, two of three vice-presidents elected in 2013. The other, Shafie Apdal, has since left the party to form Warisan.
In 2013, Zahid garnered the most number of votes for the vice-presidency. So he was the natural choice to take over the deputy president’s duties from Muhyiddin Yassin, who was subsequently sacked.
However, Hishammuddin’s appointment as a special affairs minister fuelled speculation of a fallout between Zahid and Najib, but this was denied repeatedly by them.
Universiti Utara Malaysia’s Kamarul Zaman Yusoff expects Nazri’s no-contest call to be echoed by all others.
“This is the kind of thing to show that there is no rift between the two,” he said.
But Kamarul Zaman warns that there are voices against the no-contest call.
“There might be voices rejecting a move like that. In the end, the party will try to portray that they are united at the top but to what extent they can convince everyone, I am not sure,” said the academic who has written extensively on Umno and opposition politics.
Kamarul Zaman says the no-contest call also flies in the face of Umno’s claims to openness and democracy when it ushered in historic electoral reforms for its top posts.
“They have opened their selection process to the grassroots. If they accept the proposal for a no-contest, then it will defeat the whole purpose of amending the constitution to widen the selection process,” he told FMT.
He was alluding to the reforms passed in 2013, essentially transferring voting rights from a select 2,500 delegates to nearly 150,000 party members, in a move to empower the grassroots as well as weed out money politics.
Complementing the resistance to contest is the call for loyalty, a theme that has repeatedly been played out at Umno general assemblies during its most divisive years, including in 1998 when then deputy president Anwar Ibrahim was forced to explicitly state his loyalty to Mahathir.
And loyalty is even more crucial now, when party warlords jostle to be chosen as candidates for the general election.
“The problem is bigger this time as there is an alternative for these leaders who do not get selected, which is PPBM,” he said, adding that there is fear of Umno leaders defecting to the new party in the event they are not chosen as candidates.
In the past, such a fear was seen when leaders repeatedly advised members that the party was greater than the individual.
Another thorn when it comes to loyalty among members is Umno’s obligation to its partners in Barisan Nasional when it comes to distributing seats.
Kamarul Zaman expects pressure from Umno members who want the party to demand MIC, MCA and Gerakan to allow Umno to contest seats they lost in the last polls.
“We can expect claims like Umno has the right to contest the Malay majority seats instead of the component parties. They might even bring up the fact that these smaller component parties are always fighting among themselves and that Umno should just contest the seats instead.”