Malaysia's 14th General Election and UMNO's Fall

Intra-Elite Feuding in the Pursuit of Power

Edmund Terence Gomez, Mohamed Nawab Mohamed Osman, Edmund Terence Gomez, Mohamed Nawab Mohamed Osman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780367362423
• eBook ISBN: 9781000692624
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Regional Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

The 2018 Malaysian General Election will stand as a major defining event in Malaysian history, when the ruling Barisan Nasional coalition unexpectedly lost power in the country they had ruled for over half a century. This volume brings together scholars who assess one fundamental factor that brought about this game-changing event in Malaysian politics: intra-elite feuding in the leading Malay-based political parties. This study provides an analysis of individual state politics as well as national trends shaped by the actions of leaders in government and the opposition.

An indispensable guide for scholars studying the politics of Malaysia and of Southeast Asia more broadly, it will be of great interest for all readers with an interest in Malaysian politics.

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Democratization in an age of authoritarianism

Theorizing Malaysia’s GE14

William Case

Introduction

Few pundits or practitioners predicted the transformative outcome of Malaysia’s General Election 14 (GE14). The long-time ruling coalition, the United Malays National Organisation (UMNO)-led Barisan Nasional (National Front), was ousted. A gimcrack opposition, Pakatan Harapan (Alliance of Hope), rose to power. The aim of this chapter is to engage with a “classic” literature on hybrid regimes and democratic transitions in order to better understand Malaysia’s “stunning election,” GE14. At the same time, it considers the implications that this election might hold for this literature’s theories of transition.

The analysis begins by placing Malaysia’s democratic experience in comparative context, highlighting the country’s distinctive trajectory. Second, it specifies the hybrid regime that Malaysia long operated in finer terms of electoral or competitive authoritarianism and single-party dominance. Next, the analysis turns to the recent trajectory of elections in Malaysia, evaluating the cumulative, yet ambiguous impact of the 12th and 13th general elections on GE14. Rather than any straightforward progress toward democratic change, a dialectical pattern emerges, often locally denoted as a pendulum effect.

Fourth, in focusing more closely on GE14, this study records UMNO’s tightening of electoral manipulations and its extending popular distributions, especially for rural constituents. This appeared to raise the bar that Pakatan needed to surmount. However, new manipulations also grated on many voters. And the popular resonance of new distributions, especially through cash transfers, i.e., the Bantuan Rakyat 1Malaysia (BR1M), was diminished by the imposition of a goods & services tax (GST) and the retraction of fuel subsidies.

Fifth, a range of outcomes for GE14 is canvassed. Electoral outcomes and their implications for Malaysia’s hybrid politics are collated in terms of Andreas Schedler’s notions of “regime-sustaining” and “regime-subverting” elections. Further, upon interpreting GE14 as a subverting event, a question arises over how much of its transformative impact can be understood as a process of “democratization-by-election” (Lindberg 2009). In this perspective, “subversion” delivered through electoral defeat raises the costs of continuing repression that an incumbent government acquiesces in turnover and democratic change.

However, though subverting, even “stunning” elections may exert independent effects; they are less determinative than catalytic, adding in the manner of a “flywheel” to momentum (Case 2010). Elections and any democratic change are thus nested in complex sets of inter-elite and elite-mass relations. Much depends, then, on the extent to which elites are split, widening the fissures for popular upsurge.

Today, in analyzing democratic recession, especially in the West, analysts focus intently on elite-level divisions, the vilification of establishment elites, populist mobilization and democratic recession. In this volume too, thematic attention is given to elite-level divisions. But in examining Malaysia, contributors examine these tensions as a precursor to popular upsurge and democratic transition. As such, little guidance can be obtained from recent mainstream literature. Thus, this chapter revisits the classic writing of Guillermo O’Donnell, Philippe Schmitter, Samuel Huntington and others. At base, it asks whether Malaysia’s transition—catalyzed by a subversive GE14 but principally driven by elite-mass interactions—is best conceptualized as bottom-up or top-down in its dynamics, a “Malaysian tsunami’ or a bolt from on high.

GE14 in comparative context

Most analyses of regime change today chart democracy’s decline. Ever more alarmist titles include “Facing up to Democratic Recession,” “Populists and Autocrats: The Dual Threat to Global Democracy” (Freedom House 2017), How Democracies Die (Levitsky and Ziblatt 2018) and Fascism: A Warning (Albright 2018).

Executive abuses and populist mobilization form the core of these studies. Demagogic behaviours are described as socially rooted in the attitudinal shift among many citizens today, from yearnings for political freedoms to “to be[ing] told where to march” (Albright 2018). They are set in a global context of United States indifference and Chinese encouragement.

In addition, democracy’s decline is no longer a matter of shattering executive and military coups. It involves instead an insidious discrediting and undermining of judicial independence and press freedoms, the valorizing of nativism and nationalism and the slowly corrosive imposition of authoritarian controls (Levitsky & Ziblatt 2018).

Malaysia’s GE14 stands in striking contrast to these trends. Indeed, the country’s longer trajectory marks it as a persistent outlier. First, throughout democracy’s Third Wave, Malaysia perpetuated a paradigmatic form of hybrid regime, its democratic procedures inflected with authoritarian controls (Case 1994). In 1974, the very year in which the Third Wave’s vanguard cases, Portugal and Ecuador, embarked on democratic transition, Malaysia installed a hybrid regime under which it held its first highly manipulated election. As Tun Abdul Razak, the new Prime Minister, candidly advised, “so long as the form of democracy is preserved, the substance can be changed to suit the conditions of a particular country” (Zakaria 1989: 349).

Second, as the Third Wave ebbed in democratic recession, Malaysia’s elections grew startlingly more competitive. In 2008, Larry Diamond (2008) warned of “democratic rollback [and] the resurgence of the predatory state.” But in that same year, Malaysia held its momentous General Election 12 (GE12), with voters denying the UMNO-led Barisan for the first time ever its two-thirds majority in parliament, thereby helping to inaugurate a two-party system (Chin and Wong 2009). Presciently, Levitsky and Way (2002) had already classified Malaysia’s hybrid regime as a competitive form of authoritarianism, wherein the opposition’s winning had grown imaginable. And, though haltingly, this trajectory advanced across the two elections that followed, finally bringing Pakatan to power in GE14.

Further, even more than at the global level, Malaysia’s democratic change is thrown into relief by the uncongenial neighbourhood in which it unfolds. In brief, electoral turnover in Malaysia stands in stark contrast to stalled democratization in Myanmar, persistent single-party or single-party dominant systems in Vietnam, Laos and Singapore, a resurgence of personal dictatorship in Cambodia and military government in Thailand, an ever more absolute sultanate in Brunei Darussalam, hideous abuses of human rights in the Philippines and gross majoritarianism and religious intolerance in Indonesia. Accordingly, in its 2017 report, Freedom House regards none of the countries in Southeast Asia as “politically free.” Democratic change in Malaysia has been unaided by any regional demonstration effects or “snowballing” (Huntington 1992).

In sum, Malaysia’s trajectory has varied inversely with global trends. Its hybrid regime withstood democratic transition during the Third Wave. Its transition takes place today amid democratic recession. This dissonance in Malaysia’s record evokes the distinctiveness of its hybrid regime and underlying dynamics of elite-mass relations. Let us specify this regime type more closely for it bears on the kind of transition that is underway in Malaysia today.

Hybrid politics in Malaysia

Malaysia had long operated a particular kind of hybrid regime. Featuring an uneven playing field of truncated civil liberties and mildly competitive, but grievously manipulated elections, it amounted to what Andreas Schedler (2006) classified as electoral authoritarianism. In these conditions, though the opposition might win a share of parliamentary seats and control over several state-level assemblies, it was systematically hindered from winning so big that it could form a new government. Rather, the incumbent government was reliably returned to power, its base re-energized by campaign activities and its legitimacy refreshed by victory. Thus, despite its competitive aspects, this practice of hybrid politics so dampened uncertainty that it was difficult to imagine UMNO’s defeat—at least while elites in the party remained united (Crouch 1996: 75). Indeed, this regime involves the selective adoption of democracy’s institutions in order to substantively avoid democracy. Accordingly, rather than any “diminished” kind of democratic politics, it is best examined as a sub-type of authoritarian rule (Schedler 2006).

Electoral authoritarianism, through its limits on civil liberties and electoral competitiveness, can broadly underpin a government’s long-term ascendancy. It can also be more finely elaborated with a single-party dominant system, thereby increasing the efficiencies by which to mobilize mass-level support. Further, more than marshalling voters, a dominant single party can help in regulating elites in their internal competitions over positions and constituencies. Svolik (2012) shows how, highlighting the ways in which patronage can be syncopated across elites and over time, hence perpetuating elite-level loyalties (see also Brownlee 2007). A dominant single party can raid the state bureaucracy too, amassing the patronage resources that elites demand. Indeed, in Malaysia, party and bureaucratic apparatuses grew fused with UMNO freely extracting from ministerial agencies and government-linked corporations (GLCs) the sine-cures, funds and assets which, when granted or withheld, discourage defections by elites.

To be sure, given the rapacity and ferocity with which elites in UMNO compete, party discipline is never ironclad. UMNO’s historical record bristles with epic splits between leaders, notably Tun Razak’s purging of Tunku Abdul Rahman, Hussein Onn’s jailing of Harun Idris, Tengku Razaleigh and Musa Hitam’s challenging Mahathir Mohamad, followed a decade later by Anwar Ibrahim’s challenging Mahathir, then Abdullah Badawi’s ouster by Najib Razak (see Case 2015). Further, these schisms typically reverberate throughout the party apparatus, crystallizing in factions or kem (camps).

However, as GE14 approached, the project team was advised by Shahrir Samad, long a top position-holder in UMNO and incumbent in the parliamentary seat of Johor Bahru, not to make overmuch of party rivalries. As he dryly observed, “UMNO has always been divided,” implying that fractiousness between elites was managed by paramount leaders. In this regard, Shahrir continued, “Najib is under-appreciated. He reacted [effectively] to the electoral setback in 2013.” Further, even if Najib might slip, Shahrir declared his own unshakeable loyalty: “However much the leaders screw up the party, I will stay with the party.”¹

Even so, in surveying the political terrain, the project team detected elite-level tensions. To be sure, the UMNO president and Malaysian Prime Minister, Najib Razak, in possession of immense patronage resources, kept his vice-like grip over his party’s Supreme Council members, division leaders and Cabinet ministers. But in alienating Mahathir, his one-time benefactor, then expelling Mahathir’s son, Mukhriz, from the party, as well as his own deputy, Muhyiddin Yassin, Najib fuelled new political opposition. Indeed, Mahathir wou...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of tables
• List of figures
• Contributors
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Introduction: Malaysia’s 14th General Election and UMNO’s Fall: intra-elite feuding and the pursuit of power
• 1 Democratization in an age of authoritarianism: theorizing Malaysia’s GE14
• 2 Elite contestations, politics of reform and new voting dynamics of peninsular states in GE14
• 3 Elite feuds, patronage and factions: UMNO’s demise
• 4 Electoral boundaries in Malaysia’s election: malapportionment, gerrymandering and UMNO’s fall
• 5 “10 years under Pakatan is better than 50 years under UMNO/BN”: pre-electoral conflict and campaign rhetoric in Selangor
• 6 A tale of intra-Malay elite feuds in Kuala Lumpur and Putrajaya
• 7 Gambling on grievances: Melaka in GE14 and after
• 8 Bangsa Johor: factions, feuds and the fall of UMNO
• 9 Penang: victory by support or defeat by chance?
• 10 The battle for Perak
• 11 Parties versus personalities in Kedah politics: unstable and hung state assembly in Kedah’s GE14
• 12 The green tsunami in Terengganu: the re-emergence of Parti Islam se-Malaysia
• 13 Intra-Islamist elite competition in Kelantan
• Index