COMMENT | Dr Wan Azizah Wan Ismail’s life in the past 20 years has been tragic, inspiring and mystifying.

The tragedy is personal. Anwar Ibrahim’s fall in September 1998 pitched the wife of the axed deputy prime minister and mother of six young children into a maelstrom of personal anguish.

The inspiration is political. From that vulnerable point, a retired ophthalmologist with no previous role in politics has become opposition leader in Parliament and now Pakatan Harapan’s ‘deputy prime minister-in-waiting’.

The mystification lies in popular perception. The public first saw her as Anwar’s wife, caught in a clash between Dr Mahathir Mohamad and Anwar. Now, however, they do not see in the ‘DPM-in-waiting’ either Mahathir’s commanding figure or Anwar’s charismatic personality. Instead they hear that she is preoccupied with Anwar’s fate, indecisive and unfocused.

How should an external observer regard such cries and whispers as the 14th General Election approaches?

Her public record is kinder to Wan Azizah.

She was a founding member of the hastily-established Parti Keadilan Nasional (Keadilan). She led the party when several of its top leaders were detained under the Internal Security Act in 2000. Later she oversaw Keadilan’s merger with Parti Rakyat Malaysia (PRM) to form Parti Keadilan Rakyat (PKR).

PKR’s multiethnic leadership began as an uneasy fellowship of four political types. They were Anwar loyalists who left Umno; PRM’s veteran socialists; experienced civil society dissidents; and young activists inspired by Reformasi.

The party was organisationally undeveloped and ideologically ill-defined. Internal disagreements and external inducements caused a few leaders to defect who condemned the party and its imprisoned ‘icon’.

Those were tough times which left Wan Azizah as the party’s ‘last MP standing’ after the 2004 general election setback. But she laboured with others to hold PKR together. To their credit, PKR did not mutate into an ersatz Umno, whether ‘Umno-Plus’ or ‘Umno-Lite’.

Only after the 2008 ‘tsunami’ could one properly appreciate what Wan Azizah did to nurture a Reformasi-driven generation by preventing her fledgling party from succumbing to its shock of birth, teething pains, and virulent attacks.

In fact, Wan Azizah did not botch up, keel over, give in, or sell...