Abdullah: Real change or rhetoric in
Malaysia? By Anil Netto
PENANG, Malaysia - Abdullah Badawi, the man who
took over from Mahathir Mohamad as prime minister of
Malaysia last year, has won the mandate he wanted to
legitimize his position as the country's leader. His
margin of victory (195-16 parliamentary seats at latest
count after Sunday's election) has surpassed many
analysts' expectations as his Barisan Nasional (BN)
coalition rolled back gains made by Parti Islam
SeMalaysia (PAS) in the 1999 general election.
Some of the methods used to secure victory on an
unlevel playing field, however, raised all sort of
ethics questions, and the country's Election Commission
found itself the target of many voters' anger.
With 195 out of 219 parliamentary seats counted
by Monday morning, the national news agency Bernama said
the BN had won 64 percent of the popular vote. The final
figure is likely to be lower given that the remaining
seats (which were facing recounts) were those where the
BN and opposition both scored close to 50 percent of the
votes cast.
This is in line with Asia Times
Online's own forecast last week (Malaysia's rulers poised for
victory, March 20) that the BN's share of the
popular vote was likely to reach 60 percent or more,
though it was unlikely to reach as high as the 65
percent it achieved in 1995. The victory preserves
47 years of United Malays National Organization (UMNO)
hegemony. The party has held the reins of power - in a
coalition of other parties - unbroken since independence
in 1957. It is a dominance that has fused and blurred
the dividing lines between state-owned and party-owned
resources and led to a centralization of power in the
hands of the premier.
Abdullah Badawi's success
can be partly attributed to his co-opting of some of the
reformasi movement's main grievances in the four
months or so he has been in power.
The
reformasi movement that was unleashed at the
height of the political and economic tumult in 1998 had
consistently criticized high-level graft and cronyism as
well as police brutality and unjust laws. Since coming
into office last November, Abdullah has spoken of
launching a crusade against corruption and bureaucratic
inefficiency and some arrests were made with great
fanfare. He also set up a royal commission to look into
the operations of the police. These measures were
greeted with widespread approval, even if the results
have not yet quite matched the rhetoric.
In a
sense, the departure of Mahathir last October after 22
years in power removed the reformasi movement's
principal target of anger and outrage. It was Mahathir
who had dumped his former deputy, Anwar Ibrahim, an icon
among many young Muslims, provoking an electoral
backlash. The sacking and humiliation of Anwar, now
ailing in prison, split the majority Malay-Muslim
community.
But the mainstream media have
consistently marginalized Anwar and portrayed him as
irrelevant. Given that many people's memories are
notoriously short and his party, Keadilan, faced
numerous restrictions, including the detentions and
arrests of key leaders, Keadilan was always going to
face an uphill task.
Abdullah's own approach -
his less abrasive and confrontational demeanor - also
compares favorably with Mahathir's caustic and abrasive
approach. The foreign media warmed to him, unlike their
love-hate relationship with Mahathir, whom they were
unsure where to place. Abdullah himself said that many
potential foreign investors were watching to see if he
would get a big mandate.
Abdullah's focus on
grassroots issues and agriculture won him new friends,
especially among rural Malay-Muslim voters. His quiet,
less conservative approach to Islam also put him in a
favorable light among Muslim voters in the Malay
heartland.
The BN win is also a triumph for the
advertising and marketing firms, which coordinated the
public relations blitz. The intensive advertising
campaign - from the billboards to the full-page ads to
the glossy pamphlets - bore all the marks of
professional marketing techniques.
In a sense,
the BN's campaign has been all about style/form over
substance and the marketing of a brand image. It focused
on bread-and-butter issues - peace and stability that it
said were needed for development and foreign investment,
while ignoring intangible issues: greater democratic
space, a free press, an independent judiciary. Abdullah
himself pointedly warned Malaysians not to "experiment"
with opposition parties.
For this campaign, the
BN reportedly used at least three different advertising
agencies. Its television commercials were reportedly
produced by the ad agency Leo Burnett, while two other
agencies coordinated the print and poster campaigns. The
ads consistently hammered home the theme that only the
BN could ensure "stability" and "development". Tried and
tested commercial methods were used to tug at voters'
emotions to urge them to "buy" the product (BN).
The opposition parties, by contrast, lacked the
resources and the access to the BN-controlled mainstream
media to counter the BN's advertising blitz.
Parti Islam SeMalaysia was thwarted in its aim
of adding to the two states of Terengganu and Kelantan
in the east coast that it controlled. In the event, it
not only failed in its bid to win Perlis and Kedah on
the northwest coast but lost control of Terengganu -
though it has clung to power in Kelantan by the smallest
of margins.
Asia Times Online had suggested a
fortnight ago that PAS was winning few new friends,
especially among non-Muslims, with its hardline
conservative approach (PAS winning few hearts so far,
March 6). The surprise was that the party has also been
rejected in many parts of the rural heartland by the
Malay-Muslims themselves.
The lack of material
development on the east coast did not help PAS's cause
with the two states among the poorest in Malaysia. In
this, as ATol pointed out, PAS faced great difficulty in
managing the Terengganu state government after the loss
of 80 percent of the state's income due to the federal
government's move to deny Terengganu the petroleum
royalties to which it had been entitled.
Moreover, PAS leaders shot themselves in their
feet numerous times through controversial and
contradictory statements that worried voters. One of the
most glaring recent remarks was PAS president and
Terengganu chief minister Abdul Hadi Awang's statement
that it was all right for Muslims to slander political
opponents.
The turning points for PAS came with
September 11, 2001, when the "war on terror" put PAS on
the defensive. Several "militants", some of them PAS
members, were arrested without trial, though the party
itself was never implicated. The passing of its more
pragmatic president Fadzil Noor in June 2002 was another
setback. In 1999, Fadzil, regarded as a more moderate
leader, had helped forge a broad-based opposition
alliance. During his tenure PAS worked with other
opposition parties and non-governmental organizations to
spearhead an initiative to repeal the Internal Security
Act. Hadi by contrast was regarded as a more
conservative, exclusivist leader and alienated many
Malaysians.
The biggest winner among the
opposition parties was the Chinese-based multi-ethnic
Democratic Action Party (DAP), which has so far won 10
parliamentary seats to at least match its 1999 tally.
The party, which had campaigned strongly for a secular
state rather than an Islamic state, is back as the
largest opposition party in parliament, replacing PAS.
DAP chairman Lim Kit Siang appears set to take over from
PAS's Hadi as the parliamentary opposition leader.
Anwar's party, the multi-ethnic Keadilan,
suffered heavy defeats, with Anwar's wife Wan Azizah
unsure at first whether she would retain her Permatang
Pauh seat (a recount confirmed that she had). Her
tenuous victory at least handed a lifeline to Keadilan,
whose alliance with PAS, the consistently negative
anti-Keadilan media reports, and the numerous
restrictions it faced, hurt its cause. For many
reformasi activists, Keadilan's poor showing was
a setback in the struggle for a more multi-ethnic,
democratic approach to politics.
The eclipse of
PAS and Keadilan and the re-emergence of the DAP
represent a reversal of the post-reformasi
parliament in 1999 when PAS-Keadilan were the largest
opposition force. In a sense, the results mark a return
to the unhealthy pre-reformasi situation with an
ethnic-Malay-dominated ruling coalition in power and a
largely Chinese-based opposition in parliament.
The challenge now is for the DAP, Keadilan and
PAS to reform themselves and adopt a more inclusive,
multi-ethnic approach that does not alienate Malaysians
while lobbying for an end to repressive laws - another
key reformasi demand that has not found a place
in Abdullah's agenda. In fact, for all his talk of
reforms, Abdullah has done little to broaden the
democratic space for Malaysians.
The biggest
loser was not only PAS but also the country's Election
Commission, which had a disastrous time in Selangor and
elsewhere as confusion over missing names in the
electoral rolls and wrong ballot papers led to palpable
anger. In one case, for instance, a voter in Penang who
had changed her address to another part of Penang found
that she had been registered to vote in Sarawak across
the South China Sea. Other voters found they had been
moved without their knowledge to different
constituencies, while dozens of "phantom" voters were
found registered at some addresses.
The short
campaign period - seven days - contributed to the
commission's state of unreadiness in Selangor. For that
it only had itself to blame, as the constitution
provides for 60 days from nomination day to polling.
The commission's gerrymandering of
constituencies also contributed to the BN's big win.
Moreover, its failure to stop lopsided pro-BN media
coverage and check excessive BN campaign spending meant
that the campaign itself was hardly fair. Concerns over
the secrecy of the ballot - voters' registration numbers
were written on the counterfoil of the pre-numbered
ballot papers - meant that voters could not really vote
without fear. Already there are calls for the Election
Commission chairman to step down.
All eyes are
now on Abdullah to see if he will fulfill his pledge to
wipe out corruption now that he has the mandate he said
he needed. He need not look very far. Many of the old
guard from the Mahathir administration, some tainted by
allegations of corruption, were still in Abdullah's
pre-election cabinet, and he could do well by purging
them from his new cabinet.
It remains to be seen
whether Abdullah will embark on a larger crusade against
high-level corruption that would also implicate key UMNO
officials ahead of the UMNO party elections in the
middle of the year or whether his election promises are
destined to be nothing more than rhetoric.
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