This month the government of Najib Razak broke with precedent by
allowing the opposition to stage a rally as election season kicks into gear.
The police said 45,000 people.
Some politicians claimed it was 60,000. Other independent estimates were as
high 150,000 individuals. Such squabbling over crowd numbers at political
events isn't unique to Malaysia, but nonetheless likely sets the adversarial
tone for the coming weeks or months until the next parliamentary election, due
to be called by the end of April.
“We want a free and fair
election,” said opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim. “You have a vote and I have a
vote. No one should steal our votes. We shall work to defend our votes.”
Two previous opposition-led
rallies — in July 2011 and April 2012 — culminated in mass arrests after police
fired tear gas and water cannons at tens of thousands demonstrators seeking
reform of Malaysia's electoral system.
This time around authorities
allowed the rally to take place at a football stadium in Kuala Lumpur where
Malaysia's independence was declared in 1957. Everything went smoothly.
The government was generous with
self-praise. According to the head of one governing coalition party, Gerakan
president Tan Sri Dr. Koh Tsu Koon, “the rally shows that the government is
serious about allowing a free and fair election and that it is serious about
implementing its reforms in practice."
“The outcome underscores the
sincerity and seriousness of the Najib-led National Front (BN) government in
providing democratic space and ensuring peaceful assemblies for the people to
exercise their rights and freedom with responsibility,” he added.
After the rally, which featured
some of the same civil society groups that campaigned in 2011 and 2012 for
electoral reforms, the government said that "Malaysia's electoral system
is stronger than ever," pointing to recent reforms enacted to the voting
system that some activists say are inadequate.
Although public rallies are a
staple of democracies, former Prime Minister Abdullah Badawi argued that the
event was unnecessary. "They (the opposition) have done this too many
times and every time, the crowd was not as large as they had hoped. There's no
need to do this again. It only brings about negative impact.”
While Badawi might be
easily-dismissed as someone out of touch with the country, his argument will
likely be taken up by the government in the coming weeks.
More credibly, the government is
likely to point to Malaysia's continued economic growth under its tutelage in
order to win support. In November 2012 the World Bank said that Malaysia is
expected to register a 5 percent real GDP growth in 2013. “Propelled by
domestic demand, Malaysia’s economy is likely to weather a weak global
environment,” the World Bank report said.
Part of that domestic demand is
government spending on infrastructure, and handouts given to civil servants and
low-wage workers during 2012. Governing parties say it is all part of advancing
the Economic Transformation Programme (ETP), an initiative launched in 2010
with the expressed goal of transforming Malaysia into a “high-income” economy
by 2020.
The ETP has shorter-term benefits
as well, according to the government. Dr. Chua Soi Lek, President of the
Malaysian Chinese Association (MCA), a government party that will compete with
the opposition for the Chinese-Malay vote, has said that in the absence of the
ETP Malaysia’s “economy would be like other economies that are affected by the
global economic slowdown.”
To buttress its economic appeal,
the government has undertaken a series of political reforms to lessen some of
the country’s harsher laws and now allows political protests to take place
under the terms of a new Peaceful Assembly Act passed last month.
However the governing parties are
losing support according to some polls, leaving the BN more dependent on riding
the coattails of the still-popular Prime Minister. Approval ratings for the PM
hover around the 60 percent mark, with the most recent poll by the Merdeka
Center for Opinion Research from December finding that Najib has a 63 percent
approval rating down 2 percent from the month before. December’s approval
rating was the lowest for Najib since 59 percent expressed support for him in
August 2011.
The same poll found that 47
percent support Najib’s National Front (BN) coalition, while 45 percent said
they were happy with government, down from 48 percent in October.
After making history in 2008 by
topping the one-third seats bar and thereby denying the omnipresent National
Front coalition its usual two-third supermajority in parliament – the Pakatan
Rakyat (PR, or People's Alliance) coalition led by Anwar Ibrahim remains a long
shot to win the 2013 election – but is expected to improve upon its strong 2008
election.
The National Front coalition
controls 137 seats in Malaysia’s 222-member parliament, with Prime Minister
Najib Razak’s United Malays National Organization (UMNO) the biggest party in
the coalition and effectively the party that runs the country. Anwar’s
three-party opposition, known as the People’s Alliance, holds 75 seats.
In the end, however, the BN
remains the heavy favorite, based on likely support in rural areas, with the
opposition likely to win in Malaysia's cities.
“Elections will be decided in
rural areas where 2/3's of seats are based,” says James Chin of Monash
University in Melbourne, Australia.
The opposition parties are
somewhat divided, made up of Anwar's own People's Justice Party, the
Pan-Malaysian Islamic Party, usually referred to by its acronym PAS, and the
Democratic Action Party (DAP), which is largely made up of ethnic-Chinese
members but maintains it is a multi-racial party.
Despite the prevalence of “race”
based tensions in Malaysian society, ethnic and religious issues are unlikely
to be central to the coming election despite a renewed debate over PAS desire
to impose sharia law on the Muslim-majority country. There have also been disputes
over whether Malay-speaking Christians should be allowed use the word “Allah”
to refer to God.
Ooi Kee Beng, a Malaysian
political analyst at the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies in Singapore,
says changing voting behavior have made such issues of less and less relevance.
“For a young Malaysian politician hoping to be a top leader in the near future
to use racial and religious arguments is not a wise move,” he says.
Simon Roughneen
Simon Roughneen covers Southeast Asia for several publications and has
reported from Malaysia several times.
http://thediplomat.com
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