Calls for PM to resign within ruling UMNO party
KESSLER: The UMNO has never had a setback quite like this and nothing in its past in its way of doing business has prepared it for this situation or to be able to handle it. So the immediate response was first of all to blame everybody but themselves, but then internally and instead of looking at the deep sources of their own failure, it becomes personalised, it's subject to factional strife. But everybody turns on the man responsible, the old saying when the fish stinks, it stinks from the head; well they've decided that they're going to go after, that getting rid of Prime Minister Abdullah Badawi as president of the party and as prime minister is the answer to their problems. Now, they may have to do something very new but they'll have to do something more than simply change the captain on the Titanic as they say.
LAM: So you think the situation is probably bigger than Abdullah Badawi? That it perhaps reflects disunity within UMNO?
KESSLER: There's nothing in UMNO that has prepared it for this kind of situation. They've got to deal with fundamental conflicts which are not external to the party, but to fix anything in Malaysia you have to take on basic interests that are very powerful within, within UMNO itself. So it's very hard to fix those. I suppose that deep down that on the one hand the UMNO has tried to assure itself of its position by winning the Malay vote, which it's done unsuccessfully, and at the price of undermining the support that its non-Malay partner parties get from non-Malay voters.
LAM: Indeed do you think then that the March elections showed that the BN race-based recipe is no longer working?
KESSLER: Certainly that's part of the thing; that the time has come, has well and truly come for them to move beyond on the one hand running a politics, which is the UMNO's politics, a politics of decrying communalism and saying we wish to overcome it, while the government party builds upon, consolidates and is itself dependent upon communalism. The time has well and truly come for the UMNO to lead a Barisan that is a not a confederation of ethnic communalistic parties but is a unitary party that tries to include others in it. In a sense, UMNO dominates the country by dominating the governing coalition, and it dominates the governing coalition by corralling the vast proportion, the preponderance of the Malay vote.
LAM: And Clive, you were in Malaysia during the March elections. Did you get a sense of ... perhaps even the Malays themselves getting a bit tired of this UMNO dominance that you speak of? That perhaps they are ready to share power even within BN itself?
KESSLER: There is a deep discontent not simply with UMNO but with the UMNO Barisan way of doing business. The UMNO mould has cracked. The old UMNO dominance mould has cracked, it's not easily repaired, it's unclear what else can be put in its place on the government side, and meanwhile while there's a great hope and hopefulness and optimism about the new politics that's emerging, the new politics itself is also highly problematic. That whether these five opposition state governments will all be able to hold on for four or five years is by no means a certainty, and the moment one of them falters the initiative may revert to the UMNO and to an UMNO that is ready for some fairly desperate politics. In that sense the outlook is not hopeful.
LAM: Indeed, this new politics that you speak of its leadership, the opposition leaders is derived from the old UMNO. So is that more of the same but under a different guise?
KESSLER: Well if it's just more of the same under a different guise it will have the same problems but there is a great hopefulness - I always draw the distinction between hopefulness and confidence - but people are hopeful that it will be a new politics and there is a new leadership partly from UMNO sources, partly from outside the UMNO. The interesting thing is if you look at the Malaysian press, the control of which has been relaxed slightly, you read all sorts of prominent journalists such as Zainah Anwar and Karim Ruslan who are basically UMNO government inclining kind of people who are making a very, very strong anti, not only criticising the UMNO but expressing a degree of comfortableness with the new politics that Pakatan Rakyat is embodying. And in that sense this is the doing, the achievement of Anwar Ibrahim who has come back from the dead politically to become the broker of unity and the king-maker on the opposition side, the king-maker of the new politics.
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