WITH barely an hour prior to Malaysia’s ninth Prime Minister (PM) Datuk Seri Ismail Sabri Yaakob unveiling his Cabinet line-up, former Senior Minister Datuk Seri Mohamed Azmin Ali continues to hog the limelight as the ‘most rejected’ candidate for any ministerial post.
A quick glance at the reactions by netizens on the Istana Negara Facebook following the Agong’s 90-minute meeting with Ismail Sabri who presented his list of Cabinet Ministers for the King’s consent yesterday (Aug 26) shows that the former International Trade and Industry Minister tops the list of ‘unwanted’ candidates.
Also deemed to be carrying massive political baggage with them are those from the “court cluster” while there are few calls for Opposition leader Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim to be considered as a Cabinet Minister.
The above observation was not surprising as it runs parallel with a study conducted by the Kuala Lumpur School of Artificial Intelligence (KLSAI) in late July which found Azmin alongside former PMs Tan Sri Muhyiddin Yassin and Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad as the ‘most disliked’ politicians in the country based on an analysis of tweets.
According to KLSAI, data was gathered through “web scraping” where bots are used to extract online content over a five-day period in October 2020.
“300,000 tweets related to political bases from the period between Oct 21 – 25 (last year) were scraped and analysed,” said a statement by the institution. “Various codes and crawlers were used to scrape all the related tweets, and the sentiments of these tweets were analysed as well as the common languages used.”
Tweets related to Azmin were 90.63% negative, followed by those of Muhyiddin (75.56%) and Dr Mahathir (65.6%).
“Maybe, politicians don’t take the rakyat seriously, but the rakyat see right through them. In the suspense of commencing a state of Emergency, the people were of the opinion that it was a move by Azmin and Muhyiddin to stay in power,” added the KLSAI statement.
In addition to his long-time animosity with Anwar, Azmin who is touted as having orchestrated the “Sheraton Move” has been widely criticised for the collapse of Dr Mahathir-led Pakatan Harapan Government in February last year. – Aug 27, 2021
