The younger, more “pragmatic” leaders in Pakatan Rakyat (PR) will now get their day in the sun as they are pushed to the fore to fill the vacuum that Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim will leave as he serves his five-year jail sentence for sodomy, analysts said.

The observers said PR may not split so easily as some have suggested, just because Anwar, who is often seen as the pact’s single uniting factor, will no longer be around to put out fires.

“There is a whole new generation of young leaders to take over the helm of PR, and quite a lot of them are rather pragmatic, eyeing power in Putrajaya as ultimate goals and thus unlikely to splinter among themselves,” Professor Dr Oh Ei Sun, a senior fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, told Malay Mail Online.