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TWO THOUSAND and eleven  will perhaps be remembered as the year of “waiting for GE13”. 

The chattering classes –  the socalled pundits, some  politicians, a few academicians and even some city-dwellers at their favourite kopitiams and villagers at their gerai makan – think it will be held by April, the latest by June next year.

By then the government would be about four years old, a respectable time to call for a general election which is not due till April 29, 2013. It would also not be too late for the effect of the general good feeling from the “goodies” the government has handed out to have worn out.

Some of them thought it was going to be last year, a year after Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Razak succeeded Tun Abdullah Ahmad Badawi on April 3, 2009. When it did not happen in the first half of the 2010, the date was moved to the last quarter of last year and then to March this year.

After last August (and remembering that Najib’s favourite number is 11) the forecasters were convinced that Najib was going to call for GE13 last month. They think he would do almost what desperate Tun Mahathir Mohamed did in 1999 – he called for the GE11 in November while the national budget for the following year was being debated in Parliament – something which had never been done before.

Mahathir caught everyone by surprise then, especially the opposition parties which expected the GE to be in March. The pundits thought that since Najib was not aMahathir he was going to announce the general election only after thebudget debate was over at the end of November.

Even when the prime minister said the GE13 was not going to be this year, some forecasters persisted and said it was going to be on Dec 11. One was so  sore when it did not happen that he 

called for the GE date to be fixed by law. The obsession with forecasting the election date this time is because it has been almost customary for a new prime minister to seek his own mandate from the electorate within a few months of his appointment. And Najib has been at the helm for almost three years now.

Mahathir was sworn in on July 16, 1981 and he called for the general election nine months later. Abdullah, who was sworn in on Oct 31, 2003, sought a mandate in March 2004. He won a much watered down mandate on March 8, 2008 and stepped down on April 3, 2009.

Najib, perhaps, decided that winning his own mandate was too much of a luxury to be indulged in because far more important than that was to strengthen the BarisanNasional – a coalition created by his father Tun Abdul Razak Hussein – so that it would go on ruling and not to see power slip away under his watch.

To do that, he must restore the integrity, capability and efficiency of the government that the BN had been leading since Merdeka so that it would again be looked upon as having the well-being and interest of the multiracial rakyat at heart.

Despite the challenges and criticisms, Najib had been able to implement much of the reforms that he had promised on his 100th day in office and which the government subsequently embarked on under the motto of People First, Performance Now. By the middle of the year, Minister in the Prime Minister’s Department Datuk Idris Jala was able to announce that much of the reforms launched under the various transformation programmes were being implemented smoothly and most of them had been successful.

Najib’s popularity, however, took a beating following the Bersih demonstration in July after reports on how it was handled by the police. Then there were the allegations of several scandals, including the National Feedlot Corporation, linked to the government. Yet, he bounced back with his Malaysia Day announcement of further reforms which included the repeal and reform of certain security laws and the doing away of the unpopular annual newspaper publishing permits – a move he had hinted he would do on his 100th day in office.

Despite having to weather various old and new allegations against him and his family, he continued to work tirelessly and made it a point to meet the rakyat during his walkabouts. It has made him popular and some have even considered him as the only hope for the BN in ever regaining its dominant position.

His reforms and approval ratings must have improved the image of Barisan Nasional which saw it winning all the five by-elections in a row in November, January and March. Najib was everywhere in Sarawak during the state elections in April persuading the voters to return a BN government and telling those who wanted to see a change in leadership that Chief Minister Tan Sri Abdul Taib Mahmud was “definitely” stepping down after the polls.

Campaigns against the state leader that he was comparable to the dictators of Tunisia and Egypt who were ousted by popular uprisings in January and February were blunted by the listings on billboards of development projects implemented for the peoples well-being.  

But the Sarawakian Chinese voters had made up their mind with regard to Taib – and with only a little persuasion from the DAP and the other opposition parties – they decided to punish the Chinese-based Sarawak United People’s Party (SUPP) of the ruling coalition.

Even though the state BN won two-thirds of the 71 seats in the legislative assembly, SUPP was decimated. It won only six of the 19 seats it contested and has yet to recover from the massive blow it was dealt in April. The question being asked now is whether it can regain the confidence of its Chinese constituents in time for the GE13. The question that is also being asked is whether the BN has managed to regain at least a modicum of Chinese support that it lost in March 2008.

If not, constituencies with about 35% of Chinese voters may no longer be safe haven for BN candidates. But Najib has been re-doubling efforts to prevent the bleeding. He and leaders of the MCA and Gerakan have been criss-crossing the country to persuade Chinese voters to trust the BN again.

It is perhaps this that made former finance minister Tun Daim Zainuddin optimistic enough to say that the BN will win GE13, yet pessimistic about it being able to recapture Penang and Kelantan.