IPOH, Perak - Pakatan Harapan (PH) leader Anwar Ibrahim has scored a comfortable win in the much-watched battle for the Tambun Parliament seat, marking a successful electoral debut from Perak.
Datuk Seri Anwar, 75, won a four-cornered fight in Tambun with an unofficial majority of 3,736 votes, comfortably defeating his closest challenger Ahmad Faizal Azumu, a federal minister, former Perak Menteri Besar, and rival Perikatan Nasional (PN) deputy chairman.
Mr Anwar’s win likely cements Tambun as a PH stronghold that it has won for the second consecutive time. It also marks its first victory without Datuk Seri Faizal’s Parti Pribumi Bersatu Malaysia (Bersatu), which left PH and is now leading PN.
Mr Faizal won Tambun for PH in 2018, flipping a seat that has been held by ruling party Umno for 27 consecutive years since 1986.
Tambun was the most populated constituency among Perak’s 24 seats contested on Saturday, with 160,558 registered voters. Saturday’s result also saw Umno candidate Aminuddin Hanafiah come in third in total votes cast, making it an outlier in a seat that it had held so comfortably for nearly three decades.
This is the first time Mr Anwar is contesting a seat from Perak. He was previously the long-time incumbent for the Permatang Pauh seat in Penang – his home town – until his second imprisonment in 2015 on sodomy charges stripped him of his status as its MP.
After being released and pardoned in 2018, Mr Anwar made a political comeback by contesting the Port Dickson parliamentary seat in 2019. He won a commanding 70 per cent of total votes cast.
He, however, chose to shift bases to Tambun for this election as PH made Perak its front-line state for the polls, having already secured control over its neighbouring states Penang, Selangor and Negeri Sembilan.
