Mahathir's victory boost for business
Mahathir's victory boost for business
KUALA LUMPUR (AFP): Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad's landslide victory in Malaysia's ninth general election will be a tremendous boost for investor confidence, businessmen and analysts said yesterday.
"This is exactly the stability that businessmen would like to see," said Yong Poh Kon, vice president of the Federation of Malaysian Manufacturers.
Analysts said businesses were anxious for Mahathir's ambitious economic polices not to be disrupted, calling the prime minister Malaysia's most pro-investment leader yet.
Mahathir's coalition had campaigned on its formidable record of more than eight percent annual growth during the last seven years. The National Front also promised to sustain annual expansion at seven percent for another 25 years to lift Malaysia to fully-industrialized status.
"This is a tremendous endorsement for Mahathir and for Vision 2020," said Jomo Kwame Sundaram, professor of economics at University Malaya, referring to Malaysia's quest to become fully industrialized by that year.
The sweeping win gave Mahathir a comfortable 84 percent majority in parliament, up from 70.5 percent in the 1990 polls and well over the two-thirds majority needed to pass constitutional amendments.
Analysts said the prime minister's victory was especially significant in the key battleground of northern Penang state, where the opposition Democratic Action Party (DAP) had made a strong bid to prise state control from the Front.
Penang is dubbed the "Silicon Valley" of Southeast Asia being host to multi-national technology corporations such as Germany's Robert Bosch, Japan's Matsushita and US-based Seagate, Hewlett- Packard and Intel Corp.
But voters in the showcase industrial state -- fearful of a clamp on state funds -- opted to give the Front even wider control of the state. Mahathir's party won 32 of the 33 state seats in Penang and all but three of the 11 parliamentary seats.
"Malaysia as a fast-developing country still needs a lot of infrastructural development and obviously states with the same party in power as the federal government will find it easier to get allocations for development funds," Yong said.
But some analysts said the Front's overwhelming majority also endorses an increasing tolerance of corruption.
"My fear is that the strengthened majority of the Front will be widely seen in business circles as tolerance of money politics and an increasing intimacy between politics and business," Jomo said.
The DAP and other opposition parties had argued that despite the robust economic record, Mahathir's government was riddled with corruption and mismanagement.
"People are also going to conclude that to get on the inside track of business, you basically have to buy your influence," Jomo added.