Coalition Losses, Islamist Gains in Malaysia

By Zachary Abuza

This weekend’s election in Malaysia dealt a tremendous electoral defeat for the ruling coalition government, both at the federal and state level. The United Malay National Organization (UMNO) is the lead partner in a coalition government (called the Barisan Nasional - or United Front) that includes the Malaysian Indian Congress (MIC) and the Malaysian Chinese Association (MCA). Historically together these three parties can control anywhere from 66 to more than 80 percent of parliament. In the 2004 election, the BN coalition controlled 199 of the 219 parliamentary seats, a whopping 91 percent, and 64 percent of the popular vote.

While the UMNO/BN leadership knew that they would lose some ground in this past weekend’s polls, they had no idea the degree of their setback: the opposition parties won 83 seats (37 percent), up from 19 in the 2004 parliament (9 percent). The ruling coalition only won 139 of the 222 seats (63 percent). The BN, for the first time in recent memory no longer has an unassailable 2/3rds majority of parliament.
Moreover, the deck was stacked against the opposition: the press is not completely free, and most of the media is supportive of the government, there were limits on opposition parties’ ability to hold campaign events, and rampant gerrymandering that favored the coalition, whose deep coffers afforded them greater influence.

The big winner in the election was Parti Keadilan Rakyat (PKR), the People's Justice Party, ostensibly led by the charismatic former Deputy Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim who was ousted from power in 1998 and tried and convicted on trumped-up corruption and sodomy charges. He was banned from electoral politics for 10 years, which ends in mid-2008, explaining the timing of the snap election. PKR won 31 seats, up from 1 in the 2004 election, making it the largest opposition party in parliament and paving the way for Anwar to potentially become the Prime Minister following the next election.

The Chinese-based Democratic Action Party won 28 seats (13 percent), up from 12 in 2004. The Islamist opposition party, PAS won 23 seats (10 percent), up from 6 in 2004.

The BN won a mere 51 percent of the popular vote, down from 64 percent in 2004, but more importantly, UMNO’s share of the Malay vote was only 55 percent. This is important as when UMNO loses its base of support amongst the Malays, such as in the 1999 election, it panders to the Muslim Malays, by embracing more Islamist rhetoric and policies, at the expense of its Chinese and Indian coalition partners.

What is more shocking was the opposition’s gain at the state level. Malaysia’s 13 states have long been dominated by the BN coalition. While Kelantan has been the stronghold of PAS since the early 1990s, only between 1999-2004 did the opposition ever control more than 1 of the 13 states: PAS controlled Kelantan and Terengganu. As a result, the federal government punished Terengganu by seizing much of its revenue from offshore oil. In this past weekend’s elections, the opposition won 5 states: Selangor, Perak, Kedah and Penang, as well as strengthening their control of Kelantan, which PAS came close to losing in 2004.
In Kelantan, PAS won 38 of the 45 state seats, giving it a 2/3rds majority, which will allow it to further implement their social agenda, i.e. the implementation of the sharia. But PAS also won across the Malay heartland, winning the majority of state seats in Kedah and Perak. Their pro-sharia policies will now expand to two more states.

But there is also a security component to the PAS victory: PAS now controls three of the four states that share a border with Thailand, where an Islamist insurgency has been festering. The Thai insurgents’ ability to cross over and gain safe haven in Malaysia has played a key role in the insurgency’s development. With Kelantan in the opposition’s hands, there was little the Federal government could do to assist the Thais. PAS has been vocally sympathetic to the Thai insurgents, and they now control almost the entire border.

There are many reasons to explain the BN’s losses: corruption, a slowing economy, and lagging reforms. But the real loss for the coalition was the mass defection of ethnic Chinese and Indians. These communities, represented by the MCA and MIC respectively, put up with their junior partner status in the coalition by arguing to their constituents that they can be better advocates for the Indian and Chinese communities from within government. The minority electorate, who comprise over 40 percent of the population (27 million), get angry when UMNO pushes a pro-Muslim or Islamic agenda, finally had enough and punished their political leadership for not standing up to UMNO and protecting their rights.
Minority rights have been getting trampled. Late last year 10,000 Indians took to the streets in protest, totally unheard of in Malaysia. The leadership of the protests were detained indefinitely under the Internal Security Act. But perhaps no issue has alarmed the minorities more than the large number of apostasy cases. In the past few years, there have been roughly six high-profile cases of apostasy/conversion that the government has punted on. In most cases, the courts continuously have ruled in favor of the Muslim plaintiffs, through non-rulings (stating that the parallel sharia courts have standing, depriving non-Muslims of their legal rights unless they convert). There have been shocking cases, of forced religious re-education and the forced separation of children from their parents who have tried to convert.

The issue of minority rights/issues is the third rail of Malaysian politics. It always has been and always will be. The recent pandering to the Malay Muslims in these cases in order to ameliorate conservative Muslims and keep the issue away from PAS has backfired: the ethnic minorities fled the ruling coalition. Thus the UMNO-dominated BN, will have no choice but to pander even more, in the hopes of wooing the Malays back by the next election. The one bright star is that the PKR, though Muslim dominated is not an ethnic-based party. One hopes that UMNO and the BN would learn from this.

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