11 - Conclusion: The Desiderata of Ethnic Power Sharing

Summary

This book has presented readers with narratives on Malaysia's electoral politics spanning some sixty years. It has also attempted to explain why one major ruling coalition of parties has dominated elections since Independence. The book suggests that the ethnic power sharing model of the ruling coalition, the Barisan Nasional (BN) — and its predecessor, the Alliance — has been the main reason for such electoral successes for these six decades. Most importantly, the ruling coalition has been able to deploy a strategy of mediated communalism to achieve its electoral success. As noted in the introduction, there have been three phases in the employment of this dynamic strategy of mediated communalism, which is anchored on the consociational pact of a grand coalition of ethnic groups and centripetal stratagems of moderating extremist politics. The three periods are:

1. 1. Emergent Mediated Communalism: 1950s to 1960s;

2. 2. Corporatized Mediated Communalism: 1970s to late 1990s;

3. 3. Contested Mediated Communalism: Late 1990s to 2013.

The book traces the beginnings of the Malaysian electoral system in Chapter 2, which contextualizes how mediated communalism found its salience through the institutionalization of electoral structures within a plural and ethnically divided society. In Chapter 3 the book explored the idea of the onset of an emergent strategy of mediated communalism from the 1950s to the late 1960s and showed how moderate policies of ethnic accommodation bestowed success to the Alliance in elections. Chapters 4 and 5 postulated the entrenchment of a new kind of mediated communalism via Malay primacy and party capitalism from the 1970s till the late 1990s. I have termed this the corporatized phase because of the extensive use of money politics dovetailing with the involvement of BN parties in business. While this particular phase of corporatized politics is clearly identifiable and represented its initial surfacing, there is little doubt that such a form continues to the present day. As noted in the previous chapter, the UMNO crisis of 2015 was partly the result of the use of massive sums of money in the 2013 general election, sourced through a complex web of local and international business entities established by the prime minister and UMNO president. Despite Malay dominance, corporatized politics was a highly successful strategy for the distribution of spoils to all BN parties, and the accommodation of non-Malay interests by the mid-1990s gave the BN its celebrated landslide electoral victory of 1995.