A landmark victory
It is no exaggeration to say that Monday's election results in Malaysia has sent out strong signals, not only in that country, but throughout the Southeast Asian region and possibly around the globe as well. With 196 out of 219 seats in the national parliament under its control, Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi's 14-member Barisan Nasional (National Front) coalition now commands well over two-thirds of seats in the national legislature, ensuring the government the ability to pass laws and rule the country practically uncontested.
No less significant, the ruling coalition's landslide victory has dealt a crippling blow to the coalition's main opposition, the Islamist Parti Islam SeMalaysia (PAS), which managed to maintain a mere 17 seats out of a previous 152 in the national parliament. PAS also lost its control over the northern Trengganu state, although it managed to maintain a slim majority in Kelantan, where it now controls 24 of the state's 45 legislative seats. However, with Abdullah Ahmad Badawi's National Front occupying 20 seats of the state's legislature, PAS has been deprived of the two-thirds majority it needs to pass state laws unopposed.
With this latest election victory -- one of the biggest in Malaysia's history -- the Barisan Nasional coalition now controls both the national legislature as well as 12 of the country's 13 states, while PAS' power in the only state where it still maintains a majority has been severely curtailed.
Needless to say, the Barisan Nasional's landslide victory bodes well for Malaysia's economy. Ever since the retirement in November of the country's long-ruling prime minister Mahathir Mohamad, his successor, Abdullah Ahmad Badawi, has won much praise for his pledged policy of clamping down hard on corruption and cleaning up an incompetent bureaucracy. Business and foreign investors, for their part, are looking forward to a period of stability and continuity -- provided, of course, that no upheavals disturb the peace in the coming years. Now that Abdullah has won and the opposition has been as good as crushed, all this does not seem too much to expect. Obviously, the defeat of the hard-line PAS was a relief to many countries in the region, especially those sharing borders with Malaysia, such as Singapore, Thailand and the Philippines.
For Indonesia, there are valuable lessons to be learned from this most recent Malaysian experience. Although it may be true that the Islamist upsurge in Malaysia was essentially due to a protest vote in 1999 against then prime minister Mahathir Mohamad and his iron-fisted policies, it is certainly equally true that it was the new prime minister's pledge of good governance and acting against corruption that won him the votes of the vast majority of Malaysians.
To signal that his pledge was no mere empty promise, Abdullah had one of his own Cabinet ministers, Kasitah Gaddam, arrested, and a top businessman, Eric Chia Eng Hock, indicted. He also canceled a multibillion dollar railway project involving a consortium that was reportedly favored by his predecessor, Mahathir Mohamad, and increased government financing for an aid program to farmers. Another lesson that could be learned by Indonesia's political parties at this phase of campaigning for the legislative elections on April 5 is that it was PAS's radical proposal of Islamist legal reforms that brought about its downfall.
In conclusion, in all fairness it must be said, all this might not have happened had it not been for Mahathir's farsighted, if iron-fisted, policies. To Mahathir must go the credit of having selected the right person to be his successor and thus make a peaceful and successful change of leadership possible.