NOVEMBER 30 ― Malaysia’s recent general election was full of upsets and surprises. Old political certainties were up-ended, and Anwar Ibrahim finally won the job he has aspired to for decades.

Yet the major development in the long term seems the apparent strengthening of the country’s main Muslim party PAS, a development which has placed the Islamist project in its best position since independence.

A new PM

It had been a Malaysian election like no other. After voters elected the first hung parliament in Malaysia’s history on November 19, it took almost a week of tense negotiations to form a coalition government able to command a ruling bloc of 112 seats in the new 222-seat Dewan Raykat.  

By week’s end, Anwar Ibrahim, the perennial aspirant to the prime minister’s office, finally obtained the prize he had long sought. After consulting with his brother sultans in the Council of Rulers on Thursday morning, the Agong, as head of state, announced that Anwar would become prime minister. Anwar was formally installed by sunset.

The challenges facing Anwar and his government are immense. Not least of those challenges is how he and it will manage the deals underpinning the new PM’s ascendancy as well as the legacy for Malaysian politics left by a unique election outcome. And by the long dominant Umno’s electoral collapse. No less troubling, the defeated political forces, especially the hard-liners in the Islamist party PAS, will be trying, at times desperately, to ensure that he does not succeed.

A changed landscape

The election has changed the Malaysian political landscape. Until the 14th general election (GE14) in 2018, the question of who would govern could always be answered in advance; only the precise numbers had to be filled in on voting day.

The Barisan Nasional (BN) coalition, led by Umno, would command much of the middle ground and win. Opposition would be polarised between PAS and DAP.

In 2018, there was some change. A bare majority was won, and held good in government for almost two years, by a combination of the DAP and two parties that had broken out from Umno: Anwar’s PKR and Dr Mahathir Mohamad’s Bersatu.  

 In 2022, GE15 yielded something entirely different: a three-way split, offering no clear or even prospective parliamentary majority. It was now a division in which the long dominant player, Umno-BN, became the smallest, the weakest, and the most internally divided.  

The smaller players aside, the numbers in Parliament split three ways: between Umno-BN; the Pakatan Harapan (PH) coalition of PKR and the DAP; and the new Perikatan Nasional (PN) coalition of PAS and Bersatu.  

Notably, since GE14, Bersatu has changed both its leader and its political affiliation. Bersatu had been formed before the 2018 elections as Mahathir’s instrument to help bring down his old party Umno, in concert with PH, which combined Anwar’s largely Malay-based, but in outlook multiculturalist, PKR and the doctrinally multiculturalist and secularist DAP.  

But this PH-Bersatu government, in which the then 92-year-old Mahathir returned as prime minister, was brought down in 2020 by defections from both PKR and Bersatu. These defections were led by Bersatu’s Muhyiddin Yassin who became its leader and PM following royal intervention.

Muhyiddin survived as PM for just 18 months and then, after he was brought down by Umno manoeuvering, led Bersatu into partnership for GE15 in 2022 with PAS in the Bersatu-fronted, but PAS-driven, PN coalition. 

The election numbers

Some indication of the great change since GE14 in 2018 is provided by the bare numbers.  PH fell from 113 house seats to 82; within it, DAP largely held on, dropping from 42 to 40, while PKR fell from 47 to 31, with smaller parties making up the rest; BN fell from 79 to 30, and in it Umno from 54 to 26; while the new PN consortium won 73 seats, with Bersatu climbing from 13 to 30, the Islamist PAS from 18 to 41, with two further component party-unaligned PN members making up the total. 

By last Thursday, none of the three main coalitions had found the numbers to govern, either by recruiting numbers from the Sarawak and Sabah parties or support from one another. PN refused to work with PH because of its distrust of both Anwar and of the supposed Chinese ambitions of the DAP. A much reduced and very divided Umno meanwhile struggled with the idea of working with either PN or PH.

Royal political activism

When it appeared that no coalition was about to muster a governing bloc, the Agong mounted pressure to form a unity government.

Muhyiddin firmly rejected a proposal for his PAS-backed PN coalition to work with PH, in a way that struck many as rude to the Agong. Yet elsewhere quiet and detailed negotiations between Anwar’s PH and key figures in the once-dominant but now humiliated Umno-BN team were bearing fruit.

Another factor also came into play. The election results were a huge advance for the Islamists of PAS. They knew it, and they showed that they knew it. Enthusiastically. But to quite widespread disquiet, and not only at the public level.

There has always been a deep underlying tension between the Malay royal families and the Islamist political forces.

Constitutionally and by revered tradition, the Malay sultans or rulers are the heads of Islam in their states. And they like it that way. They are disinclined to share their prerogatives of religious leadership with those who may answer to other forces.

When the Agong saw the possibility of an entente between Anwar’s PH and the chastened Umno-BN group, from whose front line some failed leaders and those in legal jeopardy were ready to stand aside, he secured the assent of the other sultans in the Council of Rulers to the emerging political pact between Umno and PH to form a unity government.

Deeper divisions

But the ramifications of the election result are likely to endure and present a challenge to Anwar’s premiership.

The election vote was more than a resounding repudiation of the ineptitude of the Umno-BN government that in 2021 replaced the Muhyiddin administration. And it was more than merely a rejection of Umno corruption, highlighted by high-profile court cases centred on leading Umno ministers and personalities associated with former PM Najib Razak. It also was more than a harsh verdict on the unrelenting selfishness of all the main Malay politicians –– those veterans of Umno who had struggled incessantly over many years for position and advantage, while being seemingly deaf to popular concerns before, during and after the Covid-19 pandemic.  

This Malay political war of all against all signified, and was the consequence of, something deeper. It reflected the fact that the rise of the new doctrine of Malay ascendancy –– of "Ketuanan Melayu” –– has over the past two decades sidelined, and intimidated into silence, other forms of political thinking and action.

But after successfully sidelining the leading non-Malay forces from the main political game, the Malay ethno-supremacists had nobody left to fight with except themselves. Always the core of national politics, Malay politics declined into incoherence, "warlordism” and factional retribution. 

Electoral retribution

This was not something that many voters were prepared to accept, especially Malay voters who were supposedly the target audience and intended beneficiaries of the new pro-Malay push. But how would they express their rejection, politically?

That is what GE15 put to the test. And the answers that it provided are as remarkable as they were, to many, unexpected. 

Over recent years, the leaders of PAS have been emboldened in the pursuit of a long-nurtured view of Malaysia’s future: as, eventually, an Islamic state operating upon the basis of and implementing Shariah law, or a certain clericalist understanding of its character and imperatives.

PAS had never succeeded in selling its Shariah-state pitch to a majority of Malay voters. But in PN, PAS in 2022 teamed up with Bersatu to sell its wares. PN offered, and was a vehicle to promote, an ultimately PAS-congenial objective and PAS-directed outcome ― but without PAS itself, with its own controversial baggage, having to sell the product. It now had PN and Muhyiddin’s Bersatu to do the political marketing job for them.

Many did not see this new Malay political force coming. Even those who foresaw it misjudged and underestimated the strength of the PAS-driven PN surge.

Many cosmopolitan voters in the modern non-Malay areas were disquieted by the tone and style of the PN campaign, especially after its election-eve indulgence in anti-Christian rhetoric.  

But for many in the semi-urban and rural Malay heartlands as well as disaffected Malays in the main urban areas, this was no problem. They wanted to repudiate Umno, to teach it a lesson. And they wanted a believable protector of Malay interests ― what Umno always insisted it was. And an apparently untainted protector too. PN persuaded them that the new coalition was that.

In shifting their trust and support from Umno to PN, these former Umno voters have now helped place PAS and the Islamist project generally in the strongest position they have ever held in post-independence Malaysia. PAS has now strengthened its grip on the political and national life of Malaysia. Or at least key parts of it. 

An uncertain outlook

This is the Malaysia Anwar will now have to govern. He will be on a short leash within his own coalition and obliged to overcome Malay suspicions he is anti-Islam and pro-Chinese. Yet it is Anwar who, surprisingly, has now rescued his old adversary Umno from what last week seemed imminent collapse and disintegration.

By doing so he has, for now, restored  a measure of economically indispensable hope and optimism to Malaysian public life. And perhaps some stability too.  

The challenges facing Anwar and his government are immense. But he and it need to succeed. Those who are hoping and even working to see that he does not will have a long season harvesting malign fruit should his national rescue operation fail. The PAS leadership is already working toward that grim harvest.

Note: This is an edited version of the article which was first published at Asialink.

* Clive Kessler is Emeritus Professor, Sociology and Anthropology, at the School of Social Sciences, at the University of New South Wales.

** This is the personal opinion of the writer or organisation and does not necessarily represent the views of Malay Mail.