After the election, can Malaysians build a post-racial politics?

The Malaysian national and state elections, concluded on 8 March, did much more damage to the government than anyone predicted. The Barisan Nasional (National Front) government was re-elected nationally, but it lost five state governments, won less than 50 per cent of the popular vote in Peninsular Malaysia, and has lost its two-thirds majority in the federal parliament.

The two-thirds majority is important because it allows control over the nation’s constitution, which Barisan has cited to justify economic and social policies which favour ethnic Malays. The last time Barisan lost this majority was 40 years ago.

Barisan has secured its historical advantage by dividing the electorate into mutually competing ethnic blocs of Malays (all Muslims by law) and non-Malays. One vote bank has, until now, countered anti-government swings in the other. Barisan had won Malay-Muslims, the majority group, by promising targetted economic benefits, and significantly Islamising Malaysian public life.

This time, ethnic voting patterns broke down to an unprecedented degree. One opposition leader (and one-time Barisan minister), Anwar Ibrahim, has dubbed this result a ‘New Dawn’ for Malaysian politics, the campaign slogan for his KeADILan (Justice) Party. Opposition voters also supported two other main parties: the Democratic Action Party (DAP) and PAS, the Pan-Malaysian Islamic Party.

One reason for the Malay-Muslim swing is that many benefits promised to them have not been delivered equitably. Race-based government assistance in education, employment and business has benefitted a small minority, while the Malay-Muslim poor are still relatively poor.

But widespread dissatisfaction has not historically translated into opposition votes. This time, however, opposition parties managed to cooperate on a realistic, multi-ethnic platform. Secularist and Islamist parties campaigned on grocery and petrol price rises, government cronyism, wastefulness and inefficiency, and explicitly called for multi-ethnic unity. PAS won more Muslims and non-Muslims alike by dropping all references to an ‘Islamic state’. Instead it stressed welfare provision for the poor as an Islamic imperative.

KeADILan’s campaign was a particular success. It won electorates which were purposely redrawn without clear ethnic majorities to make them unwinnable without winning voters from every ethnic group. From only one seat in 2004, they now have 31 seats in the federal parliament. KeADILan actively promoted a multi-ethnic energy at its party rallies in Kuala Lumpur and Selangor, mixing languages and slogans. In the Kuala Lumpur seat his daughter has won, Anwar himself directly appealed to the South Indian community with Tamil-language greetings. This would have made him cringe in his previous incarnations as Malay-nationalist politician and Islamist student leader, but it also reflects how much Malaysian politics has changed.

Anwar was responding to a protest movement which has raised ethnic Indian grievances based on continuing poverty and no access to government support. Its Tamil-language slogan, ‘Makkal Sakthi’—‘People Power’, has been widely used by opposition parties, even the historically Chinese-dominated DAP. Building such ethnic crossover appeal has been key, and KeADILan members and civil society activists have been working on it since Anwar was sacked from government in 1998, and Malaysia’s Reformasi movement found its political moment.

Through this connection, KeADILan attracted to its ranks a number of prominent civil society figures of serious integrity, as party volunteers, members and candidates. Long-term human rights activists, political bloggers, artists and NGO workers, these people are well-known in Kuala Lumpur and Selangor. They have worked for years to build the multi-ethnic politics they espouse by supporting a range of causes, and some have been elected. They lent their weight to a coalition calling for cleaner elections, which has also organised well-attended, multi-ethnic protests in recent months.

Anwar is so confident about the loose opposition alliance that he is calling it a national ‘government in waiting’. In the four states Barisan lost, alliances of the three main opposition parties are forming coalition governments, and have promised to ignore or dismantle race policies as far as possible within their jurisdictions.

But the situation is complicated. Opposition parties and their supporters are not all speaking the same language. PAS supporters have bought into an idea that only implementing Islamic principles can check government corruption, moral bankruptcy, and unequal resource distribution. PAS argues that Islamic texts provide all the necessary precedents for providing social security, equity, power-sharing and protecting minorities.

Secularist opposition voters have not signed up for this. KeADILan, for example, has explicitly stated that each major religion's values will be represented in ‘good governance’. It has voiced its constituents’ concerns in a liberal language of rights, a constitutional state, freedom, equality and justice. Few of its supporters will accept Islam as the sole organising principle of Malaysian political life, even if they can work with Islamists on many practical goals.

Take for example some recent cases in Selangor state, now opposition-controlled. Several individuals reportedly converted to Islam here without informing their families. When they died, state Islamic authorities seized their bodies and buried them according to Muslim rites, to their families’ great distress. How will the opposition parties formulate a response to this situation, accommodating both Islamists and non-Muslims? And will Islamic authorities take direction from a state government with no particular Islamic prestige?

How the opposition parties will accommodate each other remains to be seen. In Perak and Selangor states, there have already been public disagreements about who should become Chief Minister, or the composition of the executive councils. There is some speculation that these have been staged so the parties can remind their ethnic and religious voter bases that they have not forgotten them.

This demonstrates that the ethnic and religious calculus in Malaysians’ decision-making and life choices still applies today. And New Dawn or otherwise, the old politics is still in government nationally. Barisan will certainly benefit directly from any potential opposition in-fighting, and will use it to re-take political territory.

If this political opportunity is to be consolidated, committed people from within and outside the opposition parties will need to continue to work to build a new, post-racial politics which can accommodate ethnic and religious divides in Malaysia. Not just on practical issues of strategy and tactics, like grocery prices, but on the bigger questions of what kind of society they hope to create, and what kind of politics will inform its creation. They will need to unify the liberal and Islamist idioms in which their diverse supporters’ hopes are expressed, or create lasting alliances in which everyone can speak and be heard.

Amrita Malhi
The Other Malaysia