Mahathir Versus The Sultan: How Chinese Investment Could Sway Malaysian Election
A row between Malaysia’s former prime minister Mahathir Mohamad and the influential Sultan of Johor has put the issue of foreign influence in the country centre stage
The war of words that erupted this week between Malaysia’s former strongman leader Mahathir Mohamad and an influential sultan over a surge in Chinese investment into the country is a precursor to the issue taking centre stage in what is likely to be a general election year, analysts say.
In a rare episode of public defiance against Malaysia’s revered constitutional monarchs, Mahathir on Tuesday said he was willing to stand trial for lese-majeste for criticising the influx of Chinese projects in the country’s Johor state backed by its ruler Sultan Ibrahim Ismail.
The former prime minister was responding to an interview published a day earlier in which Ibrahim said Mahathir’s constant griping about Chinese projects in Southeast Asia’s third largest economy was “creating fear, using race, just to fulfil his political motives”.
Mahathir, 91, ruled Malaysia with an iron fist for 21 years until 2003.
But he has emerged as the top critic of current premier Najib Razak, who faces allegations that he is linked to a corruption scandal at the state investment arm 1MDB.
Mahathir last year quit the United Malay National Organisation (UMNO) – the linchpin of the country’s ruling coalition since independence in 1957 – and formed the Parti Bribumi Bersatu Malaysia (Bersatu), a Malay nationalist party made up of anti-Najib allies including his son Mukhriz.
“Dr Mahathir thinks it is easy to play up race because these investors happen to be from China…this is utterly disgusting,” Ibrahim said in the interview with the Star newspaper.
Ibrahim, 58, is an investor in Johor’s US$38 billion Forest City property project involving Guangdong-based developer Country Garden. The project is one of several foreigner-funded projects in a special economic zone in the state that the government hopes will become the next Shenzhen.
Mahathir, who has been on the receiving end of criticism from Ibrahim in recent months, said he was merely raising questions about the Chinese projects out of concern that the economy was being overrun by foreigners.
“Malaysia is my home and the object of my loyalty. If I have to be accused of lese-majeste for what I say, so be it,” he wrote in his blog.
Analysts told This Week in Asia the public spat was an indication the issue would dominate the general election expected to be called this year.
“Mahathir and other Malay politicians from the anti-Najib camp will use the sheer [scale of] Chinese investments into Malaysia to criticise Najib as selling Malaysia’s internal sovereignty to China, or in other words, Malaysia [jumping on the China bandwagon] to the extent of drifting into the China orbit and becoming its satellite state,” said Mustafa Izzuddin, a Southeast Asia politics researcher at the ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute in Singapore.
And James Chin, director of the Asia Institute at Australia’s University of Tasmania, said: “Mahathir is trying to show off his Malay nationalist credentials by portraying Najib as having gone to bed with the Chinese with these deals”.
