Power struggle in Malaysia pits former premier against yet another protégé
(MMO/NYTimes) – Malaysia’s governing party is at war with itself, embroiled in a power struggle that is destabilizing the country and threatening the party’s nearly six-decade stretch of uninterrupted governance.
The battle has revealed itself publicly in a nasty spat between two political titans.
Tun Mahathir Mohamad, a former prime minister who turns 90 next month, is the chief architect of a political insurgency aiming to oust the man he helped put into office six years ago, Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Razak.
Having lost none of the combativeness honed during more than two decades in power, Mahathir is pressing allegations of malfeasance in a sovereign wealth fund, criticizing the “lavish” lifestyle of the prime minister’s wife, and has resurrected troubling questions about the murder of a Mongolian woman, the mistress of a former top aide to Najib.
“I’ve had quite a long time in government, and I’ve learned a few things,” Mahathir said in an interview at his office yesterday in Putrajaya, the administrative capital he had built from scratch when he was prime minister.
Najib “wants to leave his own legacy,” Mahathir said.
“But what he does is verging on criminal.”
Najib has denied allegations of abuse of power, and urged patience while the country’s auditor general completes a report on the transactions of the sovereign wealth fund.
“If there is any misuse of power, we will not shield anyone,” he told a Malaysian television channel in April. The report is due at the end of the month.
The political combat has transfixed this nation of 30 million people, an officially Muslim country with one of the most developed economies in the region.
The latest round took place early this month when Najib was scheduled to address a public forum on the questions swirling around his leadership.
When Najib failed to show up, Mahathir took the stage. But he had just begun to speak when the police shut him down, cutting off his microphone and escorting him off the stage.
This is the third time in Mahathir’s career that he has turned on his former protégés, and he succeeded in sidelining the first two.
Another former deputy, Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim, is languishing in prison on charges of sodomy, which is illegal in Malaysia.
Anwar’s five-year prison sentence, affirmed by the country’s highest court this year, was the culmination of trials that began when Mahathir fired Anwar as his deputy prime minister in 1998, declaring “I cannot accept a man who is a sodomist to become the leader of this country.”
The second time was nine years ago, when Mahathir came out of retirement and lashed out at his successor, Tun Abdullah Badawi, for what he said was poor economic management.
Abdullah resigned, and Najib took over as prime minister.
Najib’s approval ratings have plummeted over the past year amid bleaker economic prospects and higher living costs, and Mahathir says he fears that the party will lose elections if Najib remains at the helm. But he also expressed little faith in the long-term prospects of Umno, which has led coalition governments since independence from Britain in 1957.
In the interview yesterday, Mahathir said that the party he led for decades, known as Umno, lacks vision and talented people, and that it has become a repository of patronage-seeking politicians seeking to monopolize the spoils of power.
“The little Napoleons in Umno try to keep out people who are more intelligent than themselves,” he said.
Government ministers and members of Parliament have been pressed to declare their allegiance in the dispute, and many have been cagey, afraid to alienate either their current leader or the next one if Mahathir gets his way.
