5 - The National Front's Rise in the Elections of 1974 and 1978

Summary

In hindsight, the 13 May 1969 racial riots were a predictable outcome of stark inter-communal conflicts born out of anxieties over what the nation-state could hold by way of benefits for the Malay/bumiputera majority on the one hand and for the non-bumiputera minorities on the other. Without doubt the Alliance's model of mediating communalism had failed in a very real sense with the occurrence of the 13 May tragedy. However, in path-dependence terms the 1969 crisis was only a temporary setback in how communalism had been poorly mediated or managed through the consociational arrangements of the Alliance. This was so because, the situation was one which had no reasonable alternative or counter-coalition to the failing Alliance. Much was lost, but not everything for the ruling coalition. What was needed was not a replacement of the consociation; rather, its reconstitution. In the end this was achieved in a heavy-handed fashion through the establishment of a new ruling coalition. In the words of Von Vorys, the outbreak of the riots led to a “democracy without consensus” that structured this next phase of politics. Thus, investment in political arrangements swung to the other extreme. Indeed, the structuring of politics moved in the direction of non-democratic political engineering, executed by the second Malaysian prime minister Tun Abdul Razak.

In this second phase of Malaysian politics, one saw how Malay supremacy became both the discursive trope and the primary institutional tool of the dominant Malay political party. UMNO refurbished its role by patently dominating wide aspects of Malaysian political life through the implementation of its New Economic Policy (NEP) which would be designed to raise the socio-economic status of Malays and other bumiputera and by so doing ensure Malay primacy in electoral politics. Basically, this reconstitution meant that UMNO had to wrest back some Malay votes from PAS, while its non-Malay partners had to win back support lost to the new “non-communal” parties; primarily the DAP and Gerakan. The challenge for UMNO, after having assumed leadership, primus inter pares, was to reconstitute a new coalition, one which would have a bigger partnership base, which was to be inclusive, not just ethnically but also regionally.