Even before the election is called, the political scheming grows in
volume
Malaysia's national elections,
tentatively to be held sometime in late March or early April, are shaping up as
a free-for-all that could end with neither the government's Barisan Nasional
nor the Pakatan Rakyat opposition winning enough votes to take power, resulting
in what is called a hung parliament, political observers in Kuala Lumpur say.
Actually however, the situation
is fluid and, with polling a relatively inexact science in Malaysia, there is
no clear idea which side will gather the most votes. The Merdeka Poll taken
last month says 45 percent of the people think the country is going in the
right direction, but that doesn't mean 55 percent think it isn't. The remainder
are split into different camps and some academics have questioned the Mereka
Poll's polling methods.
Past predictions of close
elections have been proven wrong as the Barisan has cruised home with
majorities - although in 2008 that majority shrank dramatically. The apparent
closeness of the race, however, has the business community on the edge. The
lack of a clear mandate for one side or the other has raised fears of unrest.
One Malay businessman told Asia
Sentinel recently that he plans to vote as early as possible on election day,
which hasn't yet been announced, and then get on an airplane immediately to get
out of the country until he sees which way the wind blows. Several of his
friends have made the same decision, he said.
That shouldn't be overblown.
Malaysia's racial situation has been poisonous for decades, since race riots on
July 13, 1969 took an estimated 400 to 600 lives in the wake of national
elections in which the opposition gained 50.7 percent of the votes although the
Barisan managed nonetheless to hold onto the parliament with 66 percent of
total seats. Voter participation is likely to go well above 80 percent,
according to academic Wong Chin Huat of the Penang Institute, as both sides
pour on the resources in what is shaping up as a bitter contest.
As many as 80 percent of the
country's Chinese voters are expected to opt for the opposition, headed by
Anwar Ibrahim, although the Indian community has shown signs of swinging back
to the Barisan despite the disastrous condition of the ethic Malaysian Indian
Congress, which is riven with factionalism and infighting. Prime Minister Najib
Tun Razak has made a special effort to woo the Indian community, turning up at
Indian festivals and other events. Indians make up about 7 percent of the
country's citizens.
With the government's two lesser
ethnic components - the Malaysian Chinese Association and the MIC - a shambles,
the biggest political party, the United Malays National Organization, has
largely turned to the ethnic Malay community, which makes up 60. 3 percent of
the country.
In doing so, the government has
allowed Malay supremacist Ibrahim Ali and his Perkasa NGO to run largely wild
in an effort to paint the Chinese as squatters in a Malay country. That, and a
series of scandals and MCA party infighting, has driven the Chinese into the
embrace of the opposition Democratic Action Party. It does raise hopes,
however, that the racial situation is being manipulated artificially for
electoral purposes and that once one side or the other wins, Ibrahim will shut
up.
The question is how much of the
Malay vote the other two component parties can pull away from UMNO. Parti Islam
se-Malaysia has sought to soften its rural, fundamentalist Islamic stance to
take moderate Malays away from the larger party. PAS has traditionally been the
best organized of the three opposition parties. Whether painting itself as
moderate turns off its traditional rural base remains to be seen. The party has
banned the wearing of form-fitting cheong-sam dresses by Chinese entertainers
in Kedah, then backed away from it, and barred women from cutting men's hair in
Kelantan.
One of the big questions revolves
around the three million new voters registered since the last election, either
young voters, who in most countries are predisposed to be more liberal and open
to change, as well as people who have never voted before but who have become
disgusted enough by one side or the other to sign up.
Najib has made a concerted effort
to woo them, turning up at rock concerts, forsaking his suit for sports dress
and giving away thousands of coasters with his twitter address on them.
Another million-odd voters remain
overseas. Thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, are planning to come back to
their home country to mark their ballots. Until January, only full-time
students, government servants and members of the armed forces and their
respective spouses living overseas - most of whom are oriented towards voting
for the government - have been allowed to register as absent voters and thus be
entitled to vote by post. Previously, only Malaysian students, civil servants
and members of the armed forces were allowed to vote overseas.
While the election commission has
mandated that overseas citizens who had registered to vote and had returned
home at least once in the five years before an election would be allowed to
cast absentee ballots, the arrangements aren't clear and voters aren't taking
chances.
There are roughly 300,000
Malaysian voters living in Singapore across the Causeway - almost all of them
Chinese. Thousands are expected to come back across the border. Some, from as
far away as Australia and the United Kingdom, have also indicated they would
return. However, Wong said, it's unlikely that their numbers would be enough to
have an impact, except by the fact that the ones who do come back are motivated
voters likely to push their families into going to the polls as well.
One scenario has the two sides
deadlocked, with neither able to form a majority, and turning to a national
unity government headed by a senior statesman like Tunku Razaleigh Hamzah, the
onetime finance minister who in the late 1980s staged a revolt against then-Prime
Minister Mahathir Mohamad. This is one time it's best to fall back on the
ancient journalistic ending line that only time will tell.
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