[ad_1]
KUALA LUMPUR – Malaysia’s opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim has criticized Prime Minister Muhyiddin Yassin’s reported plans to impose emergency measures and avoid a parliamentary vote on the budget scheduled for November.
Sources told The Straits Times that Tan Sri Muhyiddin chaired a special Cabinet meeting in Putrajaya on Friday morning (October 23) to decide on emergency measures to ensure that the next budget session in Parliament does not result in early elections if not approved.
Muhyiddin has a slim majority in parliament, and a failure to approve the budget would amount to a vote of no confidence in his government and could trigger an early vote. However, a general election, amid the new wave of coronavirus infections in Malaysia, could prove disastrous.
Datuk Seri Anwar, who recently claimed that he has enough support from the majority of the country’s 222 lawmakers to form a new government, said the Muhyiddin administration was using the Covid-19 crisis as an excuse to justify its abuse of power.
“The government has failed to provide strong leadership in handling this crisis and is instead turning to undemocratic means to stay in power,” Anwar said in a statement on Friday.
The Straits Times understands that an “economic emergency” could be proclaimed to ensure that government spending to curb Covid-19 – which has doubled in total cases this month alone – is not compromised by an increasingly unstable political atmosphere. .
Muhyiddin had an audience with the King of Malaysia, Sultan Abdullah Ahmad Shah, on Friday night and is believed to have requested the ruler’s consent to implement these emergency measures.
“A state of emergency is declared when there is a threat to our national security. But when the government itself is the source of that threat, then a state of emergency is nothing more than the descent into dictatorship and authoritarianism,” Anwar said, who is president of the Parti Keadilan Rakyat and heads the Pakatan Harapan (PH) coalition.
Other PH lawmakers have also voiced opposition to the emergency measures, saying there were enough laws in place to address the coronavirus pandemic. They accused Mr. Muhyiddin of using the measures to avoid having to demonstrate his majority at the polls.
Former health minister Dzulkefly Ahmad posted on Twitter that the country needed a “strategic public health response”, not a “legislative-political intervention”, to address the third wave of Covid-19 cases.
Meanwhile, Deputy Yeo Bee Yin of the Democratic Action Party said the Infectious Disease Prevention and Control Act of 1988 was enough to control the pandemic and questioned whether the Prime Minister was using an emergency to hold onto power.
[ad_2]
