Najib Picks Race-baiting Candidates for Malaysia Poll

ARCHIVES 2013

By admin-s On Apr 23, 2013

Decision further indicates abandonment of multiracial political coalition

“Maybe Mahathir didn’t tell Najib directly, but the message was clear, and having seen what he did to Badawi, Najib didn’t want to clash with him,” a well-wired political source said. Ibrahim Ali will contest a seat in Kelantan, a largely mountainous state dominated by rural Malays. Zulkifli was picked to run in Shah Alam, a Kuala Lumpur suburb.

John Berthelsen, Asia Sentinel

The extent to which the United Malays National Organization has abandoned Malaysia’s historic multiracial governance is exemplified by last Saturday’s naming of flamethrowing Malay nationalists Ibrahim Ali and Zulkifli Noordin as parliamentary candidates in the upcoming May 5 election.

In addition, UMNO has “borrowed” at least five parliamentary seats from the faltering Malaysian Chinese Association, the second-biggest party in the Barisan Nasional, or ruling coalition, and filled them with candidates picked by Prime Minister Najib Tun Razak.

“We have taken back many seats from the MCA,” said an UMNO source. “A lot of MCA seats were actually UMNO seats in the first place as Malay majority areas but in the spirit of cooperation we gave them the seats. Now we take them back.”

The decision for UMNO to basically go it alone is viewed as ominous for the country by political analysts in Kuala Lumpur, who say that if, as expected, the party pulls out a victory in the 13th general election, they fear that it consigns the ethnic minority Chinese and Indian populations, who make up 22.9 percent and 7.1 percent of the country’s population respectively, to powerlessness in government and society. Ethnic Malays make up 60.1 percent according to the 2010 census.

Ibrahim and Zulkifli are the president and vice president respectively of Perkasa, a conservative, extreme-right Malay superiority organization that got its start after the country’s 2008 electoral debacle that cost the Barisan Nasional its two-thirds majority in the Dewan Rakyat, or Parliament. It has the backing of former Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad, who urged that the two be named candidates.

Mahathir has become increasingly strident over protecting the status of ethnic Malays in Malaysian society despite Najib’s continued stressing of Malaysia’s composition as a moderate multiracial country. The naming of the two Perkasa leaders as candidates is a clear demonstration of Mahathir’s continuing clout despite having left power a decade ago, in 2003. After bequeathing the premiership to his chosen candidate, Abdullah Ahmad Badawi, Mahathir turned on Badawi after the 2008 election and played a major role in driving him from power so that Najib Tun Razak could take over.