As a dapper Malaysian government minister, Ibrahim Saad usually wears a suit and tie. Now, dressed in a sports shirt, he is sitting on a red plastic chair in a hamlet in the northern state of Penang, speaking earnestly with 25 Malay villagers as rainwater drips from the corrugated veranda roof and lightning flashes behind the papaya trees.
Mr Saad pleads earnestly with the rural people, who are mostly women in headscarves and a few old men. "I too sympathise with Anwar, really I do," he says. "But just sympathy is not enough. You need sympathy and policies. That is why you should vote for me."
Mr Saad, campaigning in the village of Penanti yesterday evening, has the misfortune to be the government candidate in the one constituency out of 193 in Malaysia's general election where opposition fever is at its highest.
His opponent is Dr Wan Azizah, the Dublin-educated wife of imprisoned former deputy prime minister Anwar Ibrahim, who seems guaranteed a huge sympathy vote here in her home territory.
Many ordinary people are angry at the treatment of Mr Anwar, also a local, at the hands of the Malaysian Prime Minister, Dr Mahathir Mohamad. In an interview earlier yesterday, Dr Azizah told me: "The people are with me. Everywhere I go I see smiling faces. They come up to me and say "don't worry, you have my support 100 per cent'.
"Even a local youth leader of Dr Mahathir's UMNO party, Mr Che Mansoor, who accused her of running only "because she is mad with the PM", concedes that "everyone knows that Wan Azizah will get a big majority". In a dirty election, this constituency is the cockpit of the fight between Dr Mahathir and the coalition of Opposition parties which is trying to dent his longstanding parliamentary majority in Monday's general election.
But it is Mr Saad, Malaysia's Deputy Transport Minister, who seems to be getting shafted by Dr Mahathir. As a former aide to Mr Anwar, he is regarded with suspicion by the Prime Minister's supporters. And he is disliked by the Opposition for not jumping ship when Mr Anwar was thrown out of the party and put on trial on corruption and sodomy charges.
One of his supporters said sourly: "Dr Mahathir insisted he run against Dr Wan Azizah, knowing that he would be beaten, and that he can explain away the defeat as sour grapes. If he wanted to keep him he would have given him another place." All Mr Saad can do is put a brave face on it. "We tell people that a government can't be founded on sympathy and that they are too intelligent not to know that," he told me in Penanti before driving to his next rally.
"The Opposition thinks it is a zero sum game and they are taking the constituency for granted. But it is not necessarily so. This is my village. I do groundwork in this constituency. That counts." However the junior minister draws only small groups, while Dr Azizah attracts huge admiring crowds.
I asked her if the smiles she got everywhere would translate into votes on polling day. After all, the economy is reviving and many rely on UMNO patronage. "I feel the people support me, though of course I don't take things for granted," she said.
Among the reasons she doesn't are the breathtaking bias of the media, the flooding of Kuala Lumpur with 25-minute videos testifying to her husband's alleged sodomy, and attack advertisements which make US election campaigns seem tame. The latest, she told me, was a billboard which stated that as she couldn't trust her husband, how could she trust anyone.
"The media have almost lost their credibility," she said. "That way we still have a chance of winning." And winning the election in Penang is vital, "as I am carrying on the torch for my husband".
Dr Azizah heads the new proreform National Justice Party, whose supporters have strung up so much bunting in the rice-growing constituency the roads have been turned into blue-ceiling corridors.
Asked how her children were coping with the negative publicity, she replied: "The biggest ones are not avid readers of newspapers and they don't watch the news, thank goodness. And the youngest ones watch cartoons."
In Kuala Lumpur yesterday, the Malaysian Foreign Minister summoned the ambassadors of the US, UK, Canada and Australia to complain about alleged foreign interference in the elections.