A survey which was organized by Universiti Putra Malaysia (UPM), Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia (UKM) dan Universiti Malaya (UM) under Yayasan Ehwal Siswazah (YES) found strong support for BN among students with 63% convinced that BN will win the coming GE13 and only 37% expects PR to win.
Survey on opposition-led states also showed increase in support for Dato’ Seri Najib as followed, Kelantan 60.8%, Kedah, 63.8% and Selangor 54.55%.
From all respondents, 40.1% has been identified as undecided voters and 80% of them are ready to vote for the coming GE.
Even though the survey found only small gap between the number of government (30.1%) and opposition (29.8%) supporters, only 0.3% difference, but overall, students are more confident with the leadership of Dato’ Seri Najib at 67.4% compared to Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim 52.2%, Datuk Seri Hadi Awang 31.3% and at the bottom, Lim Kit Siang with only 1.5%.
Kit Siang also led the category of leaders who do not deserve to be the Prime Minster with 61.5%, followed by Hadi Awang 26.2% and Anwar Ibrahim 16.2%.
The findings can be considered as something interesting because at the same time, the survey also showed that the favourite political media among students is Malaysiakini, a pro-opposition media which lied in most of their stories.
Indirectly, the survey proves that majority university students are wise enough to judge the credibility on stories that are published by the media and they are not easily influenced.
What we can process from this survey is that how can the survey on the support of political parties among students taken by UMCEDEL showed different result where it showed increasing support for the opposition. UMCEDEL survey also showed that the Chinese comes on top in rejecting BN with more than 90% and that seems confusing especially if we are to look at Kit Siang low popularity in YES’s findings.
Considering that the credibility of UMCEDEL’s Chairman is in doubt due to the history with Anwar in ABIM, it is wise for us to choose based on the findings from YES instead of UMCEDEL.
For that, even though the findings showed positive numbers for BN, BN should take a proactive approach to increase the trust from students by handling current weaknesses, especially in terms of preparing an alternative media platform which could go against Malaysiakini in terms of articles and news.
It is now time for BN to change its mentality to sync with our youth.
Light, harsh and obscene stories written by most pro-BN media is one of the reasons why some students who prefer to converse in English, chooses to read Malaysiakini even though they are aware of the nature of the media.
There is no doubt that such approach does provide positive impact towards certain groups, however, it is not wrong for BN to use other ways for other target readers. If that is achieved, then BN’s would definitely grow a lot stronger to face GE13.
