A party in free fall?

At loggerheads: Muhyiddin (left) has ousted Hamzah from Bersatu and now faces a new party potentially forming around his former deputy president. — Filepics/The Star

THE survival of any political party depends on a brutal logic shared with the trading floor: “Don’t catch a falling knife.” In the world of finance, this is a stern warning against buying a stock or asset experiencing a rapid price collapse.

The belief is that if you try to grab a plunging asset – to “buy the dip” as they say – you will only be maimed by its momentum before it finds the floor. You wait for the knife to hit the ground, stop bouncing, and lie still before you even consider reaching for it.

It is increasingly evident that Bersatu has become that falling knife, and the momentum of its descent is only accelerating. A collapse in its value defines the party’s status as a falling knife. A political party relies on the stability of its command structure and the loyalty of its machinery, both of which have been gutted in Bersatu.

The purge earlier this year which saw Bersatu president Tan Sri Muhyiddin Yassin sever ties with deputy president Datuk Seri Hamzah Zainudin, wasn’t a strategic realignment – it was a structural amputation.

However, Muhyiddin, who stepped down as Perikatan Nasional chairman in January, remains defiant, dismissing claims that Bersatu is “buried” as mere slander by disgruntled rebels. He argues that the recent expulsions were a necessary cleansing process to remove saboteurs and restore discipline under the party’s Constitution.

From Muhyiddin’s perspective, the party is not a falling knife but a surgical one, and he used it to excise the rot and trim dead weight. He views this “cleansing” as a vital consolidation that will enable Bersatu to emerge as a sharper instrument to address the challenges of the 16th General Election (GE16).

The party has, nonetheless, effectively lost its vice-president, Datuk Seri Ronald Kiandee, and Srikandi Bersatu chief, Datuk Seri Mas Ermieyati Samsudin, both of whom have openly sided with Hamzah.

While the party opted to suspend them to prevent them from moving freely under anti-hopping laws, both leaders have made it clear they would have preferred a total sacking so they could be done with the party once and for all.

Only a handful of Team Hamzah MPs have been sacked so far, with the remaining rebel MPs left in a state of tactical limbo. Despite no formal action taken against any individual, the alignment is clear: Team Hamzah commands about 19 MPs, leaving Muhyiddin loyalists with about six MPs.

The Maths of Defection is damning. With these 19 MPs effectively operating outside the party’s control and pledging their loyalty to Perikatan’s new chairman, PAS vice president Datuk Seri Ahmad Samsuri Mokhtar, Bersatu is no longer wielding the knife in the Opposition coalition.

The mass exodus marks the loss of its “Big Brother” status; for years, Bersatu claimed to be the moderate, technocratic face of Perikatan. With PAS officially taking the Perikatan chairmanship, Bersatu has been relegated from being the hand that gripped the handle to merely being part of a collection of duller blades in a drawer that PAS now owns.

The falling knife also faces lethal competition from the formation of a Team Hamzah party, which, mathematically, will be larger than Bersatu in terms of MPs from day one.

This new party will likely be warmly welcomed into Peri-katan by a PAS leadership that Bersatu is powerless to block. Further underlining his tacit support of Hamzah, PAS president Tan Sri Abdul Hadi Awang has confirmed that a new Opposition leader will only be named just before Parliament’s June meeting, effectively allowing Hamzah to keep the position for now.

This sequence of events suggests a move to sideline or even kick Bersatu out of the coalition. With PAS firmly in the driver’s seat, Muhyiddin’s demand to “reclaim” seats held by Team Hamzah for GE16 is being treated as a non-issue.

The friction has created a confusing dual-leadership crisis in the Opposition. We now face two distinct opposition coalitions in Peninsular Malaysia: the PAS-led Perikatan and the Muhyiddin-led Ikatan Prihatin Rakyat (IPR), a loose coalition formed by 11 parties outside the government bloc in October 2025.

While Bersatu attempts to frame IPR as a “big tent” platform to woo non-Malay support, PAS has snubbed its meetings. By skipping sessions chaired by Muhyiddin, PAS is signalling its refusal to recognise a second head in the Opposition bloc. While Muhyiddin is trying to make IPR the dominant force to regain his relevance, the initiative may fall flat without PAS’s machinery and mandate.

The danger of trying to “catch” the Bersatu knife now lies in the fact that the floor is nowhere in sight. With 19 MPs effectively operating as a separate bloc, Bersatu’s influence has dwindled to a negligible level. Every attempt to project strength through IPR is met with the cold reality of PAS’s absence.

In this environment, any investment of political capital in the Bersatu brand is a gamble against gravity.

A falling knife gains velocity because it lacks a fundamental base of support to slow its drop. Historically, Bersatu has survived by serving as the “bridge” for moderate Malay voters, but that bridge has collapsed.

Team Muhyiddin would counter that the “Abah” brand – the paternal persona Muhyiddin cultivated when he was prime minister from 2020 to 2021 – remains a potent force capable of anchoring the party’s support among the Malay electorate.

But Team Hamzah tells me that with PAS now the undisputed senior partner and Hamzah’s new vehicle prepared to absorb the party’s remaining MPs and leaders, Bersatu is no longer a strong party.

Even the MIC eventually chose not to catch the falling knife; despite aggressive wooing by Perikatan, the party decided to stay with Barisan Nasional, as Bersatu is no longer the dominant party in the Opposition coalition.

Bersatu hasn’t hit the floor yet. Will you catch the falling knife?