PETALING JAYA: Umno has said it is time to move forward without PAS, seemingly shutting the door to any further collaboration with the Islamic party under Muafakat Nasional (MN), the political pact the two parties forged in 2019.
Umno president Ahmad Zahid Hamidi said his party had decided to go solo because of PAS’ antics.
“There’s no need to mourn when PAS themselves were always playing safe and were in bed with many partners,” he said in a Facebook post.
He was responding to PAS deputy president Tuan Ibrahim Tuan Man, who said the two parties had never declared the alliance as dead.
Zahid, who said in May that MN was “barely alive”, went on to say that the collaboration PAS had offered was a superficial one that did not take into account the needs of the people.
He said this was unlike what had been outlined originally under MN.
MN was established with the aim of uniting the Malay-Muslim vote.
However, ties between the two parties have grown increasingly strained after PAS joined Bersatu to form Perikatan Nasional when Muhyiddin Yassin was the prime minister.
In February, FMT quoted a high-ranking Umno leader as saying the alliance was “merely a marriage of convenience”.
Last year, PAS president Abdul Hadi Awang had rejected the pact and described it as akin to being “shackled”.
