Najib’s Rise to Power and the Limits to Ethnocracy in Malaysia
My purpose here is to show that the UMNO-led Malaysian ethnocracy, which partially adopts democratic ideals and practices, have its limits and that Malaysia under Najib Razak will not bring about a salutary change to Malaysian politics. However, Najib could well be the catalyst for such a change.
, Opinion Asia
Malaysia will have its sixth prime minister on April 3, 2009 in the person of Najib Abdul Razak, the new President of the United Malays National Organisation (UMNO). This is a remarkable achievement for a country which was given very little chance of attaining any kind of political stability given internecine racial conflict which tore it apart 12 years after its birth on May 13 1969. But what sort of Malaysia can one expect under Najib? He is after all the son of the highly revered Tun Abdul Razak, who steered Malaysia through its troubled racial divisions and delivered ‘development’ to a fledging Malay-run democratic state – the only one of its kind in the world. Would history repeat itself and son, like father, will take the country to greater heights? I have my doubts.
The UMNO Assembly, at the end of March, which was monitored with great interest across the region, confirmed that Malaysia’s ‘ethnocracy’ – rulership through privileging ethnicity – appears to be well and alive and showed no signs of mortality. Indeed, the show of Malay solidarity by this putative Malay party, after some five previous years of bitter bickering and a disastrous electoral outing on March 8 2008, was impressive.
An irrepressible former Prime Minister, Mahathir Mohamad made a grand late entrance to a standing ovation and bestowed his blessings on the new UMNO leadership. The new lineup is almost a ‘dream team’ of the incoming President and prime-minister-to-be, save for two minor blemishes, UMNO Youth chief Khairy and UMNO Women’s Wing chief Shahrizat, both seen to be loyalists from the previous regime. The new team will be expected to inject a new esprit de corps and a new vigour into a flagging political party whose destiny so far has been to embed Malay rulership through what is famously known as Ketuanan Melayu or Malay supremacy.
My purpose here is to show that the UMNO-led Malaysian ethnocracy, which partially adopts democratic ideals and practices, have its limits and that Malaysia under Najib Razak will not bring about a salutary change to Malaysian politics. However, Najib could well be the catalyst for such a change.
A plethora of commentaries on the UMNO transition, which have peppered the print media and especially cyberspace, are at great pains to say that Najib has to carry crucial reforms to his party if it were to meet up to the new challenges of the day. Indeed, the outgoing Prime Minister Abdullah Badawi made a strenuous appeal for a host of reforms such as fixed terms for leaders and direct voting for office bearers, which he himself egregiously failed to implement. These commentaries give no answers as to how Najib could reverse a trend of talk rather than deeds, which in my view has made UMNO politically moribund, and as a consequence, out of touch with today’s political realities.
Not only is UMNO plagued by an internal rot of cronyism and corruption which its own leaders recognise – witness Mahathir’s holier-then-thou pronouncements about corrupt leaders weeks prior to the party convention – the party, more crucially does not resonate with the way Malaysian politics has shifted towards more open, multiethnic, civil society-driven agendas.
The power grab in the hitherto opposition-held state of Perak, which already saw the hand of a Najib political leadership style, is bound to backfire when the Bukit Gantang parliamentary by-election is held on April 7. UMNO seems to know no better than to employ the worn-out political strategies and tactics of “buying” elections or money politics that recently failed in Permatang Pauh and Kuala Terengganu. Another tactic is to split opposition votes with multiple candidates, which seemingly has afflicted another by-election on April 7 as well in Bukit Selambau, with its 15 contenders – unprecedented in Malaysian history!
At the end of the day, UMNO’s ethnocracy is thinly spread on a canvass that has become threadbare, that is, it depends on the superannuated Barisan Nasional (BN) formula of holding together a host of disparate, ethnically-based political parties from Peninsular Malaysia, Sabah and Sarawak. Incidentally, the BN was invented by Abdul Razak, Najib’s father and has certainly seen better days. Will the son bring down the curtains this unwieldy creation? The signs of a BN implosion or ineffectuality were already obvious from March 8 and subsequent events. Ethnically propelled parties like the Malaysian Indian Congress (MIC), Malaysian Chinese Association (MCA) and Gerakan got a thrashing and so did UMNO, in another sense, via a refurbished Keadilan (PKR) and Parti Islam Se-Malaysia (PAS). The political parties of Sabah and Sarawak are largely ‘passengers’ on such a national platform and more enlightened politicians are beginning to see through the fog. For these parties and their leaders, should the central government show a hint of change, so too would their loyalty. In short, UMNO’s hold on East Malaysian politics has always been tenuous.
Unlike BN, the opposition-strung Pakatan Rakyat or People’s Pact, represents a new kind of coalition politics. The Malay-based PAS does not play the ethnic card but rather the Muslim line, which is now moderated by a younger generation of leaders and resonates better with Malays, while the DAP has always stood for multi-ethnic politics despite its predominant Chinese membership. Most crucially, the PKR, which holds the centre ground, is the first genuinely multiracial party in Malaysia in terms of its ideals and membership. Its capture of mixed constituencies in the Klang Valley and elsewhere on March 8 shows that it is grounded on an important niche in the Malaysian political terrain.
In sum, a paradigmatic shift has occurred in Malaysian politics while UMNO and its partners are still mired in a fading ethnocracy. Malaysia’s new leader Najib Abdul Razak does not appear to have any mandate nor appetite to change this nor would he be in a position to reform his party or the BN. UMNO’s partners such as Gerakan have called for direct membership into the BN as a way of being in synchrony with the changing politics and so too has Khairy. However, factionalism, the return of the Mahathir factor and Najib’s need to balance political groups and deliver pork barrel politics would mean that both UMNO and BN would remain stuck in a quagmire. Perhaps only a defeat of UMNO and the BN in the 2013 general election would usher in a real change to this party and concomitantly, for Malaysia.
