High-Tech Dynamo Is the Wild Card in Malaysian Election
International Herald Tribune
April 21, 1995
Michael Richardson 

When Prime Minister Mahathir bin Mohamad talks of making Malaysia a developed industrial nation by 2020, he often points to Penang as a trailblazer.

While the Malaysian economy has grown for the last seven years by an annual average of nearly 9 percent after accounting for inflation, the economy of Penang state has expanded by more than 12 percent a year since 1990.

Visitors who drive across the giant bridge that links the island to the Malaysian peninsula or who come in by air can easily see why: Industrial parks and free trade zones are crowded with factories, many of them units of multinational corporations from the United States, Japan and Europe.

Despite, or perhaps because of, Penang's boom, politicians and analysts say the island has become a key test in the Malaysian general elections on Monday and Tuesday for the 192- seat federal Parliament and 11 of the country's 13 states.

Mr. Mahathir heads the National Front, a coalition made up of 12 parties that represent the Muslim Malay majority and other indigenous people, as well as non-Muslim minorities, mainly Chinese and Indians.

The coalition, which has ruled Malaysia since independence from Britain in 1957, is campaigning for re-election on a record of delivering growth, virtually full employment, moderate inflation and rising living standards - with the promise of more affluence to come.

There is little doubt that the coalition will achieve a landslide win, probably gaining another two-thirds majority as it did in the last elections in October 1990.

Then the opposition was stronger and Mr. Mahathir's United Malays National Organization, the dominant partner in the National Front, was recovering from a bout of internal feuding.

This time the opposition appears weak while the country is in the midst of unprecedented prosperity, especially for the growing urban middle-class.

But Penang - with 1.2 million of the Malaysia's total population of some 16 million - may be the election's wild card.

It is the only state with a Chinese majority, and the country's main opposition party, the predominantly Chinese Democratic Action Party, or the DAP, is mounting a concerted campaign to wrest control of the state government from the National Front's chief minister, Koh Tsu Koon.

A Western diplomat said in an interview Thursday that if Mr. Mahathir and his supporters in Penang were to lose control of a place that has become a beacon for high-tech, capital- intensive and skilled-labor manufacturing, it would severely jolt investor confidence in Malaysia and undermine the race to achieve developed- country status by 2020.

Penang is also important politically because it is the home state of Anwar Ibrahim, 47, the young deputy prime minister and finance minister who is widely seen as the successor to the 70-year-old Mr. Mahathir, possibly in the next few years.

If the front loses, "it will have great implications for Anwar's career," said Rustam Sani, a political commentator.

With such high stakes, the front is pulling out all stops to win strongly in Penang. But in doing so it is throwing a spotlight on opposition complaints that although the secret ballot and vote-counting may be clean, many restrictions in Malaysia make it difficult to unseat the front.

Mr. Mahathir maintains that strong, stable government and continuity of policies to encourage growth are the best ways of modernizing Malaysia, achieving prosperity and maintaining ethnic peace.

In Penang, Mr. Koh, a bespectacled former university professor who has worked hard to make the island a hub of growth, contends that the DAP has no credible program of government at either the state or national level.

"They don't even know economics," he said.

The DAP accuses the front of ignoring civil liberties and the poor and abusing its power in the rush for growth and profits.

Mass campaign rallies have been banned in Malaysia since 1969, after post-election race riots between Malays and Chinese in Penang and Kuala Lumpur left more than 100 people dead.

The DAP and other opposition parties contend that they are being denied fair access to television and newspapers, that the ban on rallies prevents them from reaching voters and that the official 10-day campaign period favors the ruling coalition.

Mr. Mahathir has threatened to have Lim Kit Siang, the veteran DAP leader who is trying to unseat Mr. Koh in Penang, arrested and held without trial. He said the DAP leader violated the Internal Security Act by burning newspapers in a symbolic protest and by allegedly defying laws intended to prevent people from fanning racial or religious hatred. He has been detained under the act twice before.

Copyright © 2006 The International Herald Tribune