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KUALA LUMPUR: Parti Keadilan Rakyat deputy president Rafizi Ramli has launched an online petition against calling for Malaysia\u2019s 15th general election during the year-end flood season.\u00a0<\/p>\n
In a Facebook post on Tuesday (Sep 27), he said all parties should focus on facing the floods and all other matters, which can be postponed, should be set aside.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201c(Holding the) GE15 during the floods means more than RM1 billion (US$216 million) will be used to administer an election while the people\u2019s fund should be better off being channelled to disaster management efforts.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cIt also means hundreds of thousands of civil servants will have to be on duty to handle the election while they should be with volunteers assisting flood victims,\u201d he said.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The petition on change.org has received more than 7,500 signatures as of 2pm on Wednesday.\u00a0<\/p>\n
United Malays National Organisation (UMNO), or president Ahmad Zahid Hamidi in particular, has been pushing for snap polls with the intention of wresting back power.\u00a0<\/p>\n
UMNO currently forms the ruling government alongside Perikatan Nasional\u2019s Parti Pribumi Bersatu Malaysia and Parti Islam Se-Malaysia. However, there have been signs that they will be entering the election as opponents.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Prime Minister Ismail Sabri Yaakob, an UMNO vice president, is facing mounting pressure to dissolve parliament, but he has yet to commit to a timeline. The present government has until September next year to hold GE15. \u00a0<\/p>\n
Ahmad Zahid\u2019s call for GE15 does not sit well with the opposition, which insists that the monsoon season at the end of the year is not a suitable time for polls. Malaysia\u2019s Meteorological Department had warned of floods during the north-east monsoon season, which typically starts in November and ends in March. \u00a0<\/p>\n
The Bagan Datuk MP, however, said the opposition wants to delay the general election because\u00a0it is afraid of losing.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
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[ad_1] KUALA LUMPUR: Parti Keadilan Rakyat deputy president Rafizi Ramli has launched an online petition against calling for Malaysia\u2019s 15th general election during the year-end flood season.\u00a0 In a Facebook post on Tuesday (Sep 27), he said all parties should focus on facing the floods and all other matters, which can be postponed, should be […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":5434,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[40,6],"tags":[285,150,71,459],"class_list":["post-5433","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-asia","category-news","tag-election","tag-flood","tag-malaysia","tag-news-and-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.asiaposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5433","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.asiaposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.asiaposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.asiaposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.asiaposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5433"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.asiaposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5433\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.asiaposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5434"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.asiaposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5433"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.asiaposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5433"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.asiaposts.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5433"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}