1 - The Imperative of Mediated Communalism

Summary

At 3 p.m. on 10 February 2015, Anwar Ibrahim, the leader of the Malaysian Opposition Front, Pakatan Rakyat (PR), was driven in an unmarked vehicle from the Malaysian Federal Court at the Palace of Justice in Putrajaya to the Sungai Buloh prison to be jailed for the second time in his political career. Five federal justices led by Chief Justice Arifin Zakaria unanimously rejected his appeal against a prison sentence of five years for sodomy. The case was a virtual facsimile of his earlier conviction of 1998 when he was sentenced to six years jail but released in 2004 after a federal court overturned the earlier decision. Anwar's incarceration the second time around — indeed, he was detained in 1975 as a social activist too — shows not just the occupational hazard of being a politician in Malaysia but also the extremely high stakes of political contests and outcomes. Malaysia's electoral politics over six decades has seen the tumultuous struggles of political figures, none more prominent than Anwar, to change and drive the country in a more democratic and accountable direction. It has been a politics of repressive tolerance dominated by the ruling coalition of the Alliance and then the Barisan Nasional (BN) after. At the point of writing, the opposition alliance of the Pakatan Rakyat (PR) had twice denied the BN its customary two-thirds command of parliamentary seats and, most spectacularly, won more than 50 per cent of the popular vote in the 2013 election.

This study examines the manner in which Malaysia's multicultural, largely democratic politics have manifested through elections and the factors that drive electoral success and failure. So far there have been thirteen general elections, along with an accompanying number of state elections. The most recent and much anticipated general election was held on 5 May 2013. These elections, the preceding political campaigns and the post-electoral ramifications provide a rich source of materials for the study of procedural and electoral democracy in Malaysia. These two concepts have found their way into the political science literature; the former referring to a process of incorporating technical, transparent electoral procedures while the latter connotes a notion of popular or voter sovereignty.