19 - By-elections Reveal New Malay Politics

Summary

On 5 May, in the midst of the Sarawak state election campaign, a helicopter crashed in the jungle and killed five people, including the Malaysian Deputy Minister for Plantation Industries and Commodities, Datuk Noriah Kasnon and the Member of Parliament for Kuala Kangsar, Sundaran Annamalai.

This means that the political acrimony that elections whip up will persist for a while yet since two simultaneous by-elections will now have to be held. This is not to say that the Malaysian political scene needs any help in staying rancorous.

The by-elections – in Kuala Kangsar in Perak state and in Sungei Besar in Selangor – are scheduled for 18 June; but while technically minor battles, they are part of bigger political wars being fought in Malaysia at the same time.

These conflicts were adequately demonstrated on 17 May when Anwar Ibrahim, the jailed leader of Parti Keadilan Rakyat (PKR) and unofficial opposition leader, issued an eight-page letter to his followers to exercise caution and wisdom in following the lead of his long-time nemesis, former Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad, in the latter's attempt to unseat Prime Minister Najib Razak through signed support from over a million Malaysians. Many from the opposition and from civil society groups have indeed given open support for Mahathir's Citizens’ Declaration, helping it to go already beyond the millionsignature target.

In essence, the key points of Anwar's letter were firstly a pronouncement that he ‘is inclined not to be seen to be uniting with the Citizen's Declaration group, and to start to set a distance’; and secondly to state that the Declaration was ‘Tun M's document, effective and incoherent viewed in the context of reform’. The distrust between the two men is obvious and understandable but there is also fear of Mahathir effectively usurping the role of opposition leader.

Beyond the noise, these events send out obstinate signals that tell us something profound about Malaysia's present socio-political situation.

Only diehards now imagine that significantly more non-Malay support for the opposition than it so impressively garnered in the 2013 elections is forthcoming. In the recent Sarawak state election, it was the Democratic Action Party – a basically Chinese party that is trying to be re-recognised as a multiracial one – that was the main loser.