Mahathir's Party a Big Loser in Malaysian Vote 
International Herald Tribune
December 1, 1999
Thomas Fuller

The Malaysian general election has produced a convincing victory for the ruling coalition but a striking loss for the party of Prime Minister Mahathir bin Mohamad.

The ruling coalition retained a two-thirds majority in Parliament, with 148 seats, but Mr. Mahathir's party, the United Malays National Organization, the largest party in the coalition, lost more than 20 percent of its parliamentary seats. Now, Mr. Mahathir is more beholden than ever to his ethnic Chinese and Indian partners in the coalition, setting the stage for behind-the-scenes horse trading as the prime minister's allies demand a greater voice in the running of the country.

The remarkable gains by the opposition Pan-Malaysian Islamic Party in the country's traditional Malay heartland also raise the prospect of increased Islamicization as well as heightened demands for more control over oil and gas assets in the northern state of Trengganu. The Islamic opposition won there for the first time since independence.

Results from Trengganu illustrate the extent of the losses sustained by Mr. Mahathir, who was born, began his career and still has his constituency in a nearby state.

The Islamic party took control by tripling its seats in the state assembly and winning all eight parliamentary seats. That is a huge shift from the 1995 election, when the Islamic party won just one parliamentary seat.

The Malays of the heartland also abandoned Mr. Mahathir in his own state of Kedah, where the Islamic party won more than half the parliamentary seats.

In the last election, Mr. Mahathir's party swept all 15 seats. Kedah had always been a Mahathir party stronghold, so much so that the head of the party's campaign in Kedah had named the campaign "E-Z 99."

The irony for Mr. Mahathir in the results Monday is that he began his political career four decades ago with such pro-Malay zeal that he was expelled from the party he now leads and his seminal book, "The Malay Dilemma," was banned.

The book called for reform of the entire political system, giving Malays privileges over and above what other races were given.

Now, three decades after he wrote that book, the champion of the Malays has been forced to rely on votes from ethnic Chinese Malaysians, the very people he accused of being "chauvinists" in his book.

"UMNO has been licked," said Abdul Razak Abdullah Baginda, executive director of the Malaysian Strategic Research Center, referring to the Mahathir party. "Forty percent of UMNO cabinet members lost. There was a major swing across the Malay belt, and it was the Chinese votes that helped to save a lot of the Malay candidates."

In broad terms, Chinese voters, who make up 25 percent of the population of 22 million, swung to the government while Malay voters, who make up more than half, swung to the opposition, especially in the north.

The election radically changes the makeup of the opposition. The Islamic Party, with 27 parliamentary seats, is now the clear leader of the disparate parties that make up the Alternative Front.

The largely ethnic Chinese Democratic Action Party received 10 seats, and the National Justice Party, founded earlier in the year by the wife of Anwar Ibrahim, the jailed former deputy prime minister, five seats.

Chinese voters in traditional opposition strongholds swung to the government largely because of concerns of instability and fears of voting for an opposition alliance that included a party whose stated aim is an Islamic state in Malaysia, a prospect that was relentlessly repeated by the government-controlled media.

"The Islamic state trump card was very, very potent," said Lim Kit Siang, who led the parliamentary opposition for three decades but was defeated in the state and parliamentary seats that he was contesting. His deputy, Karpal Singh, lost with him.

In what could be the chief paradox of the elections, the abandonment by the ethnic Chinese of their opposition parties has only served to reduce the leverage they had over the Islamic Party in the opposition.

The lopsided opposition now has a very weak Chinese voice.

The defeat, Mr. Lim said Tuesday, "has brought about the very situation that they were trying to avoid."

The election also highlighted the importance to the national coalition of the two Malaysian states on the island of Borneo. Together they contributed 30 percent of the ruling coalition's seats.

Copyright © 2006 the International Herald Tribune