Malaysian leader jump-starts elections and stacks the odds

The elections will pit Najib, who has vowed to “make Malaysia great,” against his erstwhile mentor Mahathir Mohamad, a former prime minister whose 22-year rule was as transformative as it was divisive. After years of hounding Malaysia’s political opposition, Mahathir, 92, defected from the governing coalition to partner with his former enemies.

“It’s like a civil war in Malaysia right now,” said Fahmi Fadzil, the communications director for the opposition People’s Justice Party. “I’ve never seen this country so divided.”

Malaysia’s electoral commission will announce the date of the elections next week, but it is expected to occur by mid-May. In the last general elections in 2013, campaigning was limited to just 15 days. Despite the brief run-up to the voting that year, however, the National Front coalition, which has run Malaysia since independence, lost the popular vote for the first time in history.

Discontent with Najib has simmered for years, especially among members of Malaysia’s ethnic Chinese minority. But Najib, who is the scion of an ethnic Malay political dynasty, has been able to count on rural Malay constituents whose influence has been amplified by race-based policies that benefit them.

The governing National Front alliance is dominated by Najib’s United Malays National Organization, which has safeguarded preferential treatment for the Malay majority in areas ranging from government jobs to university places.

The governing alliance appears to have focused on creating ideal conditions to assure Najib’s re-election. On Thursday, a government body temporarily deregistered Mahathir’s new political party because it had filed incomplete paperwork. Until the documentation is complete, Mahathir’s political bloc will not be allowed to campaign or display its logo.

“There is no rule of law in this country,” Mahathir said at a news conference late Thursday. “Najib is cheating to win the election by paralyzing his opponents.”

Even before the order to dissolve Parliament was announced Friday, flags for the National Front began appearing at overpasses and major intersections in Kuala Lumpur, the nation’s capital. Banners for opposition parties, which are expected to band together under the People’s Justice Party in order to contest the elections, were not on display.

Two controversial bills were passed in the waning days of Parliament. One rejiggered voting districts so drastically that the opposition derided it as gerrymandering. The other made creating or circulating “fake news” punishable by up to six years in prison. The definition of “fake news” has not been made clear.

Earlier this week, Najib promised to give raises to Malaysia’s 1.6 million civil servants, most of whom are Malay. The prime minister also vowed to lavish hundreds of millions of dollars on police officers and certain companies run by bumiputra, or sons of the soil, as Malays and indigenous peoples are known.

Mahathir was the architect of the affirmative action program for Malays, who were discriminated against during British rule. Encouraging mass immigration by Chinese and Indians, the British also gave some prime jobs in the colonial administration and business sphere to non-Malays, fostering resentment that festers to this day.

Pakatan Harapan, Malaysia’s opposition coalition, is an unwieldy collection of disparate forces that includes Chinese liberals, Islamists and nationalist Malays. Meaning “alliance of hope” in Malay, it is led by Mahathir, even though some of the coalition’s most prominent members are veteran opposition leaders who were jailed or harassed during the former prime minister’s long tenure.

Chief among them is Anwar Ibrahim, a former deputy prime minister to Mahathir who fell out of favor and was jailed on sodomy and graft charges that were widely seen as politically motivated. Anwar famously appeared in court in 1998 with a black eye that Mahathir’s allies insisted was self-inflicted.

Anwar is now back in prison after a second sodomy conviction. He is scheduled to be released in June. How the opposition will deal with two suns in its political solar system — Mahathir and Anwar — remains to be seen.

The electoral choice is so uninspiring for some younger Malaysian voters that they have started a movement to cast spoiled ballots to protest the state of national politics.

The National Front, however, says that it has delivered on 99 percent of its campaign pledges from 2013. The country of 30 million people is among Southeast Asia’s most prosperous, even though a study released last year by the United Nations and the Malaysian Health Ministry found high rates of child malnutrition.

“Our target is nothing short of being one of the top nations in the world,” Najib said Wednesday.

Yet Malaysia’s international reputation has been damaged by a scandal surrounding the mishandling of at least $3.5 billion connected to the One Malaysia Development Berhad fund, known as 1MDB.

An investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice, which is building a case to seize around $1.7 billion in assets connected to the fund, found that $731 million that was deposited into bank accounts controlled by Najib had come from 1MDB. Najib contends that the bulk of that money was given to him by a Saudi patron.

“For the prime minister, it’s either be re-elected or go to jail,” said Mukhriz Mahathir, an opposition politician who is also Mahathir’s son. “The stakes could not be higher for him.”

Multiple Malaysian investigations into 1MDB have found no impropriety connected to Najib or his associates. Officials with 1MDB have said no money went missing from the fund. Najib has hinted that investigations by foreign countries into 1MDB are Western witch hunts.

Both Najib and Mahathir have a record of blaming outsiders for stirring up dissent against them. Mahathir suggested that Jews were behind the Asian financial crisis in 1997. Najib has advised “white people” to stop interfering in Malaysian affairs.

Malay populism is expected to be stirred up during the campaign, and some Malaysian minorities have characterized these elections as an existential moment for a country that depends on a delicate balance of races for stability. Although numbers are hard to come by, an ethnic Chinese brain drain appears to be robbing Malaysia of qualified white-collar workers.

“If the opposition loses again, there will be no hope left,” said Liew Chin Tong, an ethnic Chinese strategist for the opposition Democratic Action Party. “I worry that some people will end up leaving Malaysia.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

Malaysian leader jump-starts elections and stacks the odds

The elections will be a referendum on Prime Minister Najib Razak, who is running for a third term amid a lingering scandal involving billions of dollars that were diverted from a Malaysian state investment fund.

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