Umno Supreme Council member Isham Jalil said the party’s top leadership was committed to fielding new, young candidates for the parliamentary elections, though he acknowledged it was almost unconventional for the party.

“We don’t usually do these kinds of things (field mostly new faces in an election), we don’t take such risks. But after GE14, we made many changes and implemented new things,” he told FMT in an interview.

“One of these changes was to highlight new faces. We took that risk in Melaka, and we won three-quarters of the seats. This means that the combination of new faces with Umno and Barisan Nasional’s branding led to success.”

He said BN did this in Johor too, with about 70% of candidates in the state election comprising fresh faces. BN stormed to a two-thirds majority win, snatching 40 of the 56 seats in contention.

Isham, who was BN’s communications adviser for the Melaka polls, said the coalition had also experimented with “positive campaigning” during that state election.

He wanted to champion this approach for BN for GE15, too, in bringing a new brand of politics to the nation.

“To me, Malaysian politics is way too toxic. There’s so much negativity. So BN will bring positive politics, to inform the rakyat about what we plan to do. We won’t fight accusations with more accusations, but with facts.”

Isham acknowledged that BN had its work cut out to win in urban areas, but believed that the coalition must look into winning over voters there instead of just depending on its strongholds.

He said BN needed to capture the hearts and minds of the urban Malaysians, adding that they were not exempt from the issues of the past two years.

“Amid Covid-19, the urban folk came under various pressures. The first to lose their jobs were those in urban areas. Today, around 700,000 people are jobless, of whom 70% live in urban areas.”