Malaysian politics

What the doctor ordered

Feb 19th 2009 | KUALA LUMPUR
From The Economist print edition

Mahathir Mohamad continues to make his influence felt

IF ALL goes to plan, Malaysia’s prime minister, Abdullah Badawi, will step down on March 31st. His deputy and anointed successor, Najib Razak, will then be sworn in as the country’s sixth prime minister since independence from Britain in 1957. Like his predecessors, Mr Najib, the British-educated scion of a political dynasty, will do so as leader of the United Malays National Organisation (UMNO). Before the handover, the party meets to elect a new slate of executives, with Mr Najib standing, uncontested, as party leader.

Tributes to Mr Badawi, a soft-spoken Islamic scholar, will be muted. Many UMNO stalwarts blame him for last March’s calamitous general election, when the UMNO-led National Front coalition lost its two-thirds parliamentary majority and four state governments to the opposition. After plenty of pushing, Mr Badawi agreed to fall on his sword.

Perhaps nobody in Malaysia, apart from Mr Najib, will be as glad to see him go as Mahathir Mohamad, the former leader who picked Mr Badawi as his replacement in 2003. Dr Mahathir, who ruled Malaysia for 22 years, soon came to rue his choice. He has spent much of the past few years hurling brickbats at his beleaguered successor with scornful fury. On his blog he has repeatedly aired his regret at not tapping his protégé, Mr Najib, to follow him.

Now that Dr Mahathir is getting his way, some in Malaysia are bracing for a return to “Mahathirism”, a leadership style that favours turbocharged, state-led industrialisation and promotes “Asian values” as an antidote to Western freedoms. So far Mr Najib has done little to dispel this impression. His circle of advisers is said to include Daim Zainuddin, a former finance minister under Dr Mahathir, as well as other familiar faces from the past. Mr Najib is a staunch defender of the draconian Internal Security Act, a favourite tool of Dr Mahathir’s. Mr Badawi has used the law sparingly. On his watch, Malaysia’s once lapdog media has also started to snarl a bit.

There is as yet no talk of a formal role in the next administration for Dr Mahathir, who resigned from UMNO last year in protest at Mr Badawi’s stewardship. Naturally, Mr Najib says he welcomes sage advice from an elder statesman. But some in the party want to go much further and to have Dr Mahathir at the shoulder of the new prime minister, particularly when it comes to steering the economy out of crisis. Growth is forecast to fall sharply this year. As the world rediscovers Keynesian deficit-spending, so the argument goes, Malaysia should revisit the sort of mega-projects that are among Dr Mahathir’s enduring legacies, such as Kuala Lumpur’s Petronas Twin Towers, which were, fleetingly, the world’s tallest buildings.

The opposition is discovering that politics in Malaysia is as murky and ruthless as it was in Dr Mahathir’s day. This month the National Front regained control of the northern state of Perak after the defection of four assembly members—a counterstroke by Mr Najib after the opposition had claimed a defection to its side. And this week a leading opposition politician, Elizabeth Wong, a well-known human-rights activist, offered to resign her state-assembly seat in Selangor. Photos of her asleep, naked, were circulated by mobile phone.

Such setbacks, however, may not halt the opposition’s electoral advances. Mr Najib faces an early test in April when two by-elections (for one federal and one state seat) are due to be held. At a by-election in January in Kuala Terengganu, a northern town, the opposition easily saw off a spendthrift UMNO challenger. Sadly for the party, Mr Najib, who led that failed campaign, seems as unpopular as the outgoing prime minister, particularly among young Malays. Reviving the bulldozing cronyism of Mahathirism, however, is not the answer, says Zaid Ibrahim, a former minister who recently left UMNO after 23 years. He argues that voters are turned off by the stench of corruption and injustice. “Nobody, not Najib, not Mahathir, can save them,” he says.

Now aged 83, Dr Mahathir has not mellowed much. At a recent seminar on the Gaza conflict, he explained that Israelis had “learnt from the Nazis” in inflicting suffering. Such rabid outbursts please his supporters, who point to the pride of ordinary Malaysians in Dr Mahathir’s achievements. “People long for the good days of the Mahathir era,” says one pro-Najib politician vying for the post of UMNO youth leader. His name is Mukhriz Mahathir, son of the former leader.