“We love the party, we built the party in hard circumstances. It is very unfair to many party leaders who have built the party for years, and then suddenly, when we want to celebrate our 20th anniversary, we become traitors. Because of these traitors, the party is now 20 years old,” he said in his most public acknowledgement of the party’s internal conflict to date.

In 1999, he entered active politics and became an assemblyman for the state of Selangor, Malaysia’s richest state – and the one he would later go on to administrate as chief minister in 2014, a year before Anwar was imprisoned for sodomy a second time.

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A consummate politician, Azmin has managed to be elected to power in almost every election he stood in, even when the-then opposition lacked national traction, except in 2004. Then, he was found guilty of lying for Anwar on the stand, although the Court of Appeal reversed this decision eight years later. In 2008, he was key in helping the Anwar-led opposition make dramatic and unprecedented national gains.

However, it was when Azmin became Selangor’s chief minister that the cracks within PKR began to show – clashes between Azmin and other factions within PKR began to rear their ugly head as the party struggled to stay united under a leader distracted by weighty legal proceedings.

His route to the role, too, was fraught – in a political manoeuvre dubbed the Kajang Move, party insiders attempted to oust the incumbent state chief minister, a fellow PKR member, and replace him with Anwar. This resulted in a nine-month political crisis and in many ways marked the most visible lines drawn within a party that was struggling to make sense of its new-found pockets of political power after years as mere opposition voices.

However, as Azmin comes into his own and grows out of the mentor-protégé relationship he shared with Anwar, it appears as if ties will only continue to sour in a manner not dissimilar to the close relationship Mahathir and Anwar once shared before the latter was unceremoniously booted from his cabinet.

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Now, as the party attempts to heed calls to attend to the business of governance rather than politicking, internal voices question why Azmin has not yet been sacked for egregious behaviour such as skipping a year’s-worth of internal meetings despite being party deputy president, and walking out of the recent annual congress.

Some party members say that it is because the optics are too difficult to manage – sacking a protégé who was so long seen as a loyalist would only create a martyr, the same way Anwar kick-started a Reformation movement around his own sacking in 1998.

Others, however, are more romantic – Anwar still feels kindly towards the boy who stood by him during the ups and downs of his career, and even unchecked ambition can be forgiven.

The chief concern as the rift deepens, however, is that of the coherence and stability within the Pakatan Harapan coalition, in which PKR commands the bulk of its parliamentary presence.