Pakatan Rakyat’s bid to make Johor its frontline state has taken on a new urgency with talk that DAP leader Lim Kit Siang will be getting out of Perak to contest in Gelang Patah.

DAP leader Lim Kit Siang started his 100-day countdown to the general election the day his party voted in the new DAP leadership last year. The countdown is now about 27 days or so to the polls and it looks like he is going to be quite spot-on.

But the most talked about item in Lim’s blog has been his comments about DAP’s ambitions in Johor. It has set off speculation that he is getting ready to move south to contest a seat in Johor. DAP will be leading Pakatan Rakyat’s bid to win more seats in Johor and Lim will be at the forefront of the action.

Pakatan insiders said he is slotted for Gelang Patah following a hush-hush seat swap between DAP and PKR. In exchange for Gelang Patah, DAP has agreed to let PKR have Bakri which is expected to be contested by Johor PKR chief Datuk Jimmy Chua Jui Meng.

The Pakatan strategy in Johor is for DAP and PKR to contest the bulk of parliamentary seats, leaving PAS to contest most of the state seats.

“Kit Siang coming to Johor is very real,” said the Pakatan insider.

Lim, who is Ipoh Timur MP, has been typically tight-lipped about his migratory plans but he recently told a Chinese newspaper that Johor DAP chairman Dr Boo Cheng Hau had asked him to consider contesting in Johor. The seat swap is seen as a blow to Dr Boo who had publicly fought Chua for the Gelang Patah seat. To add salt to injury, his supporter and incumbent Bakri MP Er Teck Hwa is now left scrambling for another seat.

The other big hint of Lim’s plans is that DAP’s 47th anniversary do this Monday will be in Skudai, where Dr Boo’s state seat is located. The event will be a sort of pre-campaign launch for the party in the state.

Lim is said to have spent almost as much time in Johor as in Perak. Party members in Perak are already talking about lawyer and Canning assemblyman Wong Kah Woh as the likely candidate to replace Lim in Ipoh Timur.

Pakatan’s focus is now mainly in Johor because its earlier hopes of making inroads into Sabah has gone up in smoke following the Lahad Datu crisis. Pakatan will be lucky to hold on to what it has in Sabah, let alone make inroads. As such, everything it has will now be channelled to Johor.

In his blog posting, Lim indicated that Pakatan will focus on 15 parliamentary seats in Johor which is more than half of the 26-seat tally in the state. They are Gelang Patah, Kulai, Bakri, Kluang, Segamat, Johor Baru, Tanjong Piai, Labis, Batu Pahat, Ledang, Muar, Pulai, Pasir Gudang, Tebrau and Sembrong.

But he admitted: “I am not saying that Pakatan is sure to win every one of them.”

His target is hardly modest though - he is talking about Pakatan winning 10 parliamentary seats.

He has declared that “the winds of change is blowing strong and hard” in Johor after attending functions in Johor Baru, Kulai and Gelang Patah recently.

The crowds at Pakatan ceramah up north have dwindled but DAP ceramah in Johor have seen unprecedented turnouts.

The Johor ground used to be very hostile to the Opposition but more people are now keen to hear what they have to say.

Johor-born Liew Chin Tong, the Bukit Bendera MP in Penang, is also said to be moving to either Kulai or Kluang. But Liew is going there with a poor track record because the first-term MP failed to stand up on issues affecting constituents of Bukit Bendera.

DAP’s Lim is the equivalent of Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim in PKR. Both do not hold official posts but wield immense power as de facto leaders. Lim is continuing his track record of going from state to state to win new seats for his party, a tactic that former party chairman Tunku Aziz Ibrahim once described as the Lim family “travelling political circus”. Lim’s political career has covered a variety of state and parliamentary seats in Malacca, Selangor, Penang and Perak.

Lim no longer has the wow-factor but people still want to hear him speak. He shows no sign of slowing down despite turning 72 last month.

His presence will lend some oomph to Pakatan’s campaign and party people are hoping that he can create a wind down south.

But he has one major drawback - he has an image problem among the Malays.

They have been watching him champion Chinese issues from the 1960s to now and they find it hard to believe that this man and his party can genuinely represent issues that matter to the Malays.

Barisan won 25 of the 26 parliamentary seats in 2008 and 50 of the 56 state seats. But according to Liew, a domino effect is about to take place in Johor.

He claimed that Chinese support for Pakatan is around 70%, Indian support about 50% and Malay support about 30% and that if a perfect storm occurs, Pakatan could win up to 20 parliamentary seats.

He went as far as to claim that Barisan’s castle in Johor may crumble if a perfect storm of the sort that blew through the country in 2008 comes into shape.

So far, there is no sign of such a storm. Instead, Pakatan states like Kedah, Selangor and Kelantan seem to be shaking in their own political storms.

Liew said that the general election may prove the Johor fortress to be merely a sand castle but his detractors think he is building castles in the air.

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