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On the morning of May 9, 2018, I landed on Langkawi Island, off the northwest coast of the Malayan peninsula. Coincidentally, Malaysian federal elections were being held on the same day. This island was once a bastion of support for the incumbent Prime Minister Najib Razak, but this election was to be different. As I drove from one side of the island to the other, it seemed as if every inch of roadside had sprouted a flag bearing the logo of either the incumbent party or, in even greater numbers, the newly-founded opposition party. Though early in the morning, voters were already out in full force, lining up at community centres and mosques whose gates were plastered with ‘Vote Here’ signs. For six decades, the entirety of Malaysia’s independence, the United Malays National Organization (UMNO) has dominated government and the civil service. However, with the newly founded Pakatan Harapan (PH) Party quickly growing in popularity, it appeared that the opposition might win an election for the first time in the country’s history, thereby unseating Razak.
Pakatan Harapan leader Mahathir Mohamad campaigned on a platform of anti-corruption, and raised concerns about the UMNO’s domination of public institutions. These concerns, although well-founded, were a recent and ironic addition to Mahathir’s rhetoric. Between 1981 and 2002, Mahathir served as Prime Minister and leader of the UMNO coalition. The May 9th election in 2018 was the endpoint of an intense and bitter campaign that pitted the nonagenarian Mahathir, former authoritarian leader, against the man widely considered to be his protégé. For the first time ever, UMNO was ousted from power. Explaining this historic transition of power necessitates first unravelling the reasons why Najib should have won, and the one reason why he lost.
Though Malaysia holds elections, the country has failed to meet the minimum standards to designate it a democracy.[1] Elections cannot be seen as the sole standard for democracy, as many overtly authoritarian countries hold elections to confer legitimacy in the eyes of its voters.[2] Thus, it is more accurate to describe Malaysia as an electoral authoritarian regime. This is a conceptual category of polities that combine nominally democratic institutions with coercive elements of authoritarianism.[3] Notably absent from these authoritarian tendencies is overt electoral fraud. This type of regime does not stuff ballot boxes, miscount voters, or scare voters away from the polls. Instead, such regimes dupe voters into electing incumbent politicians. In Malaysia, these electoral strategies include restrictions on civil liberties, political disenfranchisement, and patronage. Generally, these systems enable authoritarian governments to dominate electorates for decades.[4]
Under both Mahathir and more recently Najib, the UMNO sought to make itself a permanent feature of Malaysia’s governance. Entrenched systems of patronage amongst party insiders and ethnic Malays encouraged mass-level cohesion and loyalty.[5] The civil service, controlled by partisan UMNO elites, allocated resources to pro-UMNO constituencies to effectively subsidize continued electoral support.[6] Further efforts to ensure continued rural ethnic Malay support were made by strengthening pro-Malay affirmative action policies, which eroded the status of the once economically dominant urban Chinese and Indian minority populations.[7] Restrictions on civil liberties, such as the colonial-era Sedition Act and the more recently ban on “fake news” during the election, effectively criminalized legitimate criticism of the government.[8],[9]
Another key strategy aimed to ensure UMNO domination was the creation of unequal constituencies through a process called malapportionment. An electoral commission nominated and funded by UMNO elites freely and arbitrarily altered constituency boundaries, to the point that consistently pro-UMNO constituencies had as few as 18,000 voters, while their pro-opposition counterparts had as many as 146,000.[10] In the 2013 elections, this strategy helped the UMNO coalition secure 60% of seats in the national legislature, even though the coalition lost the popular vote.[11] Despite utilizing a number of strategies to ensure continued electoral success, the May 9th election in 2018 demonstrated a key feature of electoral authoritarian regimes: though elections might be unfair, they are still contestable. As a result, Razak was ousted from power. But how did he lose an election so heavily tilted in his favour?
Mahathir’s platform of anti-corruption became a rallying point due to overt corruption amongst UMNO elites. The most poignant of examples is the 1 Malaysia Development Corporation (1MDB) scandal, which accused several high-level political leaders of embezzling state funds. 1MDB was established in 2009 as a government investment company with the goal of promoting economic development and foreign investment.[12] Conveniently, the company was wholly-owned by the Prime Minister, who also named himself Minister of Finance.[13] There was little oversight in the management of 1MDB funds, as Razak was the sole signatory of the company with full control of all investments.[14] In 2015, international newspapers discovered that under Razak’s management, the fund had lost an estimated seven to ten billion US dollars, of which nearly 700 million had been deposited into his personal account.[15] The UMNO responded to this accusation with an official story that explained the sizable increase in Razak’s personal funds as a gift from an unnamed Saudi Prince.[16] In an attempted cover-up, officials investigating the newspapers’ claims were summarily dismissed, and allegations of high-level corruption were denied.[17] This blatant display of corruption proved too much of a scandal for the incumbent government, despite their clever techniques to win previous elections. In no great victory for democracy, the voters of Malaysia chose to elect Mahathir and his authoritarian legacy.
Although May 9, 2018 was a historic day for Malaysia, UMNO’s defeat after over sixty years of rule might be perceived as anticlimactic. Mahathir’s return to power cannot be expected to generate any result other than a shift from the UMNO’s brand of authoritarianism to that of the newly founded PH Party. Restrictions on civil liberties will continue to remain, and Mahathir will rule with the same anti-democratic tendencies as he did while in power twenty years ago. While voters remain optimistic, it is unlikely that Malaysia will see anything other than token reforms in the near future, and the removal of UMNO patronage only to be replaced by a newer version. The new Mahathir regime will be maintained through the same methods previously used by the UMNO, many of which Mahathir had originally enacted himself.
Nick Agnew is a contributor for Synergy: The Journal of Contemporary Asian Studies, Southeast Asia section.
[1] “Malaysia,” Polity IV Regime Trends: Malaysia 1959-2015, Polity IV Index, www.systemicpeace.org/polity/mal2.htm.
[2] Levitsky, Steven, and Lucan Way, “The Rise of Competitive Authoritarianism,” Journal of Democracy, vol. 13, no. 2, 2002, pp. 53.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Case, W. (2017), Stress testing leadership in Malaysia: The 1MDB scandal and najib tun razak, The Pacific Review, 30(5), 636.
[6] Ibid.
[7] Case, W. (2017), Stress testing leadership in Malaysia: The 1MDB scandal and najib tun razak, The Pacific Review, 30(5), 637.
[8] Ibid., 639.
[9] “The old man’s last challenge; Malaysia’s election,” The Economist, 5 May 2018, p. 38.
[10] “Stop, thief! Corruption in Malaysia,” The Economist, 10 Mar. 2018, p. 18.
[11] Ibid.
[12] Lee, Julian, “1MDB, Civil Society, and the Dawn of Malaysia’s New Era,” The Round Table, Dec. 2018, pp. 1.
[13] Case, W. (2017), Stress testing leadership in Malaysia: The 1MDB scandal and najib tun razak, The Pacific Review, 30(5), 633.
[14] Ibid., 634.
[15] Ibid., 633.
[16] “Stop, thief! Corruption in Malaysia,” The Economist, 10 Mar. 2018, p. 18(US).
[17] Ibid.
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