Azmin vs Rafizi: Climatic fight at Julau

The civil war between Datuk Seri Azmin Ali and former Pandan MP Rafizi Ramli for the deputy president post became more intense as they approach the final leg of the PKR leadership election.

In PKR Julau division, there is a controversy embroiled where its membership was reported to spiked from 603 members to more than 13,000 members overnight.

For Julau media exposure trend, we can see that the topic started to increase on November 6 when Housing and Local Government Minister Zuraida Kamaruddin questioned Wan Azizah’s visit to the constituency. Zuraida whom is openly aligned to Azmin’s camp labeled Wan’s visit as ‘poorly timed’ considering that the PKR leadership election is still going on.

The following day, November 7, former PKR supreme council member Latheefa Koya also questioned Wan’s visit, describing it as ‘inappropriate and highly questionable’. However, Wan denied both Zuraida and Latheefa claims stating that she is campaigning for Rafizi in Julau.

When we look at the top issue for the topic of “Julau” in November, there are three controversial topics that were commonly reported by the media. First, the sudden spike of PKR membership in that division. Second, Wan Azizah’s visit to Julau. Third, the tablets used for the e-voting was hacked with the software ‘Prey’.

For the influencers of “Julau” topic, Rafizi took the number one position with 418 statements as he is the one who launched the report on the hacking scandal involving “Prey”. However, Azmin Ali only made 132 statements regarding the topic. Hence, he took the eighth position.

The second top influencer is PKR Central Election Committee chairman Rashid Din made the official statements regarding the polling, such as the e-voting system issue and that there will be no re-election for Julau division.

As a conclusion, the war is over between Azmin and Rafizi. Nevertheless, the question of how Julau gained approximately 10,000 members overnight has yet to be answered.