Najib sets up Malaysian poll thriller

ARCHIVES 2013

By admin-s On Apr 10, 2013

Anil Netto, Asia Times

Malaysians are gearing up for what are expected to be the most closely contested general elections in the country’s history. Prime Minister Najib Razak announced the dissolution of parliament on April 3, ending nearly two years of speculation over when the polls would be held. The Election Commission meets this week to set a date for polls, which must be held within 60 days.

Najib’s earlier reluctance to call an election likely reflects his ruling Barisan Nasional (BN) coalition’s hesitation faced with the resurgent challenge of the Pakatan Rakyat (PR) opposition coalition. Parliament’s current five-year term expires on April 28; no previous premier has ever dissolved the legislature so close to the end of its term.

Some political analysts believe the opposition is poised to make historic gains, or even win the election outright. PR won five of 13 national states at the 2008 general election, notching nearly 47% of the popular vote for federal level parliamentary seats. The result denied the BN a two-thirds parliamentary majority needed to change the constitutional and represented the BN’s worst yet electoral showing.

The then prime minister Abdullah Badawi took responsibility for the slippage and handed the premiership to Najib the following year. Najib, who has not yet faced the electorate as BN’s leader, has fared well in opinion surveys, despite a significant erosion in public perceptions of the wider BN coalition and its associated politicians. A Merdeka Center poll from February showed that popular support for the ruling coalition had fallen below 50%.

Najib has governed under the heavy shadow of former premier Mahathir Mohamad, who ruled with an iron fist for two decades from 1981-2003 and publicly sparred with Badawi during his tenure. Despite certain reforms, including abolishment of the notorious Internal Security Act (only to have it replaced by a new security law that also allows detention without trial), Najib’s administration is viewed by many as carrying much of the legacy of Mahathir’s old order, characterized by corruption, patronage and environmental destruction.

At the same time, Najib has notably shied from public debates with PR leader Anwar Ibrahim, who was famously sacked as finance minister and later imprisoned on corruption and sodomy charges under Mahathir after the 1997-98 Asian financial crisis.

In the wake of the opposition’s 2008 electoral gains, Anwar vowed to bring down the BN government through parliamentary defections that never materialized. He faced down new charges of sodomy – a criminal offense in predominantly Muslim Malaysia – that many analysts believed were politically motivated to drain his coalition’s political momentum.

Najib has warned that voting for the opposition would represent a step backward for economic reform and that a PR-led government would subvert the US$400 billion Economic Transformation Program (ETP) his government launched in 2010. The policy aims to lift Malaysia to high-income nation status by 2020.

Officials have pointed to rising household incomes, up from 4,025 ringgit (US$1,315) per month in 2009 to 5,000 last year, as indication of the policy’s early success. Those income gains have been padded by a series of government hand-outs, including pay hikes and other financial perks for civil servants and employees of government-linked companies and agencies, that critics have said are tantamount to vote-buying.

Higher household incomes, opposition critics argue, mask the net economic pinch of faster-rising costs of living, including inflation in the prices of basic foods, education, health care and rental properties. They argue that the ETP policy is ultimately unsustainable and has wholly failed to address the still yawning income gap between rich and poor.

Over the weekend, Najib promised a raft of new handouts if elected, including direct cash payments to unmarried Malaysians of voting age, reduced car prices and a 20% reduction in Internet service charges. He also promised a pan-Borneo highway project to match the one on offer by the PR.

For its part, the PR has vowed to scrap the New Economic Policy, a race-based affirmative action program to uplift the economic position of the majority Malays and other indigenous groups known as bumiputras, long championed by the BN. The NEP expired in 1990 but its race-based philosophy has continued to underpin BN’s economic policies.

Minority ethnic groups, including Chinese, who make up 25% of the population, and Indians, who represent around 7%, believe the policy has purposely discriminated against them. Only 34% of the Chinese population now supports the BN, according to the Merdeka Center poll. The PR has said it will replace the NEP with a non-ethnic, needs-based approach that will broadly assist the poor, including many bumiputras.

The PR has targeted the BN’s history of official corruption and political favoritism, promising a more clean-hands approach to governance. By plugging corruption and leakages and reducing gas subsidies to independent power producers, the PR promises to save 46 billion ringgit lost each year to leakage.

This money saved, the coalition says, would be used to raise oil royalty payments to the oil-producing states where many of the poor in Malaysia live to 20% from the current 5%. The PR also wants to abolish highway tolls and study loans while providing free education and more affordable housing.

Despite these campaign promises, the PR is no shoo-in to win. ”It is going to be very hotly contested but hopefully we can go for a change,” said Abdul Rahman Kasim, information chief for PR’s PAS party in Penang state’s Tasik Gelugor division. ”But it is very unpredictable… They are told if they vote for other parties they will lose [ethnic] Malay supremacy.” The Islamic party PAS is one of PR’s three component parties, the other two being Anwar’s People’s Justice Party and the Democratic Action Party.