KUALA LUMPUR, May 20 — Datuk Seri Dr Chua Soi Lek gave a damning appraisal of MCA’s future today, saying the party was in critical condition and yet still did not understand what went wrong.
In a Facebook post defending his previous stand for the party not to accept any Cabinet post after the 13th general election, the former MCA president said this would have allowed the party to renew itself from within.
He also insisted that MCA did not have any moral standing to claim Cabinet posts on the pretext of representing the Chinese community when the latter clearly rejected it at the ballot box.
“MCA’s fortunes in the May 9 general election could have been different if we continued to remain outside the government.
“Today, MCA is like the patient in ICU with no doctors to give the right prescription,” he said.
Dr Chua staged an unlikely comeback from a sex-tape scandal to win the presidency of MCA in 2010 and pledged to keep the party out of the Cabinet if it did worse in 2013 than the 2008 general election.
He honoured his pledge, but the rest of the party leadership disagreed and resigned en masse to trigger an internal party election eventually won by Datuk Seri Liow Tiong Lai, the current president.
Dr Chua’s assessment of MCA’s political fortunes is not far off. The party went from 31 federal seats in 2004 to just 14 seats in 2008.
The decline continued in 2013 when the party’s parliamentary representation was halved again to just seven.
In the 14th general election, MCA was reduced to a single parliamentary seat: Ayer Hitam held by deputy president Datuk Seri Wee Ka Siong. -Malaymail
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