A landmark victory
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.