July 2009, Volume 20, Number 3 $12.00 China Since Tiananmen Andrew Nathan Jean-Philippe Béja Elizabeth Perry Jeffrey Wasserstrom Kevin O’Brien Ching Kwan Lee & Eli Friedman Guobin Yang Malaysia’s Electoral Upheaval James Chin & Wong Chin Huat Bangladesh’s Fresh Start Jalal Alamgir Tom Gallagher on Scottish Nationalism Alina Mungiu-Pippidi & Igor Munteanu on Moldova Forrest Colburn on El Salvador Leslie Anderson & Lawrence Dodd on Nicaragua Democratization by Elections? Staffan I. Lindberg Valerie J. Bunce & Sharon L. Wolchik Lise Rakner & Nicolas van de Walle Ellen Lust malaysia’s electoral upheaval James Chin and Wong Chin Huat James Chin is a political scientist and head of the School of Arts and Social Sciences at the Malaysian campus of Monash University. A for- mer financial journalist, he publishes extensively on Malaysian and regional politics. Wong Chin Huat is a lecturer in journalism at the same institution and is spokesperson for the Coalition for Clean and Fair Elections (BERSIH). Malaysia held its twelfth general election on 8 March 2008, with re- sults that surprised everyone. For the first time since independence in 1957, the ruling National Front (BN) coalition lost the two-thirds parlia- mentary majority that had enabled coalition leaders to change the con- stitution at will. The opposition coalition, led by former BN figure An- war Ibrahim, not only deprived the BN and its core, the United Malays National Organization (UMNO), of their accustomed legislative domi- nance, but also managed to win control over five of the thirteen state governments. Long thought to belong firmly to the realm of one-party dominance and semidemocracy, Malaysian politics had taken a sudden and remarkable turn toward greater competitiveness despite all the steps that the BN had taken to bias elections in its own favor. From any angle, the results were an unprecedented setback for the BN. In the wake of the voting, UMNO and its junior partners (the most important of which are meant to represent Malaysia’s Indian- and Chi- nese-heritage minorities) found themselves facing a transformed politi- cal landscape. Customarily, the real elections in Malaysia have been the intra-UMNO party races, and the real legislature has been the UMNO caucus in Parliament, with UMNO’s leader and second-in-command au- tomatically filling the offices of prime minister and deputy prime min- ister, respectively. State governments that are under opposition control (or which simply show an independent streak) have found themselves undermined by the center’s bribery, or simply toppled outright via the center’s imposition of emergency rule. Journal of Democracy Volume 20, Number 3 July 2009 © 2009 National Endowment for Democracy and The Johns Hopkins University Press 72 Journal of Democracy ta b l e —th e dr a S t i c ch a N g e o f t h e el e c t o r a l la N d S c a P e i N t h e 2008 ma l a y S i a N el e c t i o ns Pa r t y Sh a r e o f Va l i d Vo t e S (%) No. o f Pa r l i a m e N t a r y Se a t S 2004 2008 Change 2004 2008 Change Barisan 63.84 51.39 -12.45 199 140 -59 Nasional (BN) UMNO 35.63 29.98 -5.65 110 79 -31 UMNO’s West 22.63 15.37 -7.26 51 20 -31 Malaysian Allies UMNO’s East 5.58 6.03 0.45 38 41 3 Malaysian Allies Pakatan Rakyat 34.06* 47.43† 13.37 19 82 63 PKR 8.43 19.00 10.57 1 31 30 DAP 9.94 14.07 4.13 12 28 16 PAS 15.69 14.36 -1.33 6 23 17 Minor Parties 2.10 1.18 -0.92 1 0 -1 & Independents Total 100.00 100.00 0.00 219 222 3 Notes: * The Pakatan Rakyat did not exist in 2004. This figure represents the total vote gained that year by the three parties that would later coalesce as the Pakatan Rakyat. † The vote and seat shares of the Pakatan Rakyat parties in 2008 include those of a socialist and an independent who ran on their tickets. Until the 2008 voting, there had never been more than two opposition state governments at any one time, and the only question nationally was how wide would be the BN’s final margin in Parliament. The mainstay of BN dominance has been a first-past-the-post electoral system freely salted with gerrymandered and other malapportioned constituencies de- signed to award the ruling coalition a hefty seat bonus. Coming out of the 2004 elections, for instance, the BN commanded a record-breaking parliamentary majority with nine out of every ten seats in the House of Representatives (Parliament’s lower chamber) under its control, based on 63.8 percent of the popular vote. In 2008, the National Front could manage only 51.4 percent of the vote. Its seat bonus, although still sub- stantial, gives it control over just 63 percent of the lower house, short of the all-important two-thirds majority. The opposition bloc in the current, 222-member House, the Pakatan Rakyat (People’s Alliance), now holds 82 seats; its largest member is the People’s Justice Party (PKR) of Anwar Ibrahim, which has 31 seats. The opposition’s state-level victories may be its most impressive feats. Fully 43 percent of Malaysia’s registered voters live in the five states that elected opposition governments, and two of the five—Penang and Selangor—are the richest in the country. Opposition candidates also notched a near-sweep in the Federal Territory of Kuala Lumpur (which is located geographically within Selangor), and now fill all but one of the capital territory’s eleven House seats. James Chin and Wong Chin Huat 73 These remarkable results are perhaps best read as a repudiation of the authoritarian style of UMNO’s Mahathir Mohamad, who served as pre- mier from 1981 until his retirement in 2003. Mahathir was credited with fueling impressive economic growth by means of gigantic development projects and public-spending programs. Under his rule, Malaysia joined the ranks of the world’s industrialized countries. In his eagerness to reach his goals, however, the physician-turned-politician never hesitat- ed to assault or undermine any democratic institution that got in his way, eventually turning the UMNO-dominated Malaysian state into some- thing resembling a personal dictatorship.1 Mahathir had little respect for the rule of law, the sovereignty of Parliament, the independence of the judiciary, or the freedom of the media. He consolidated his grip on power by expanding the resources and authority of the prime minister’s staff and creating institutions that answered directly to him. As formidable a figure as Mahathir was, his tenure in office was not unmarked by conflict. There were two major outbreaks of trouble, one in the late 1980s, and one in the late 1990s. In each case, the infighting was triggered by immediate economic woes, but also fed by causes both structural and personal that stretched back several decades to 1969. On May 13 of that year, ethnic Malays angry at their own perceived eco- nomic deprivation had begun rioting against Malaysians of Indian and Chinese descent. In order to prevent fresh outbreaks of such strife, the government declared the New Economic Policy (NEP) to address Malay concerns. In an ironic way, the NEP approach of favoring ethnic Malays and other so-called bumiputras (“sons of the soil”) would turn out to be the fountainhead of political pluralism in Malaysia. By turning UMNO and the state that it ran into a vast machine for pumping out patronage and rent-seeking opportunities, the NEP ensured heightened factional strife during tough economic times, when various groups within UMNO would find themselves battling over slices of a shrinking patronage pie. The first wave of such infighting came in the wake of the worldwide re- cession of the early and middle 1980s. In 1987 intraparty voting, Mahathir only narrowly beat back a leadership challenge from Tengku Razaleigh Hamzah, a prince from the northeastern state of Kelantan. Through a series of legal maneuvers during which the independence of the Malaysian judi- ciary wound up as collateral damage, Mahathir shut Tengku and his back- ers out of party ranks. Tengku thereupon formed a splinter party and went into opposition, but found himself demonized for appearing too close to a Christian minority group (more than 60 percent of Malaysia’s 26 million people are Muslim). He returned to UMNO, a beaten man, in 1996. Anwar Ibrahim’s Challenge It would not be long, however, before the East Asian financial cri- sis of 1997 set off an even more bitter struggle for power in the higher 74 Journal of Democracy reaches of Malaysian politics. This one pitted Mahathir against his hand- picked heir apparent, Anwar Ibrahim. An Islamist firebrand in his youth, Anwar had benefited from Mahathir’s need to sideline and weaken com- petitors such as Razaleigh and his erstwhile ally, Musa Hitam. Both an able lieutenant to Mahathir and a shrewd player on his own behalf, Anwar had become deputy president of UMNO and deputy premier of Malaysia by 1993. Looking for his own niche and message, he began to rebrand himself as a reformist and moderate, setting himself apart from his mentor by promoting engagement with civil society and participa- tion in the “dialogue of civilizations.” Mahathir insisted that the financial crisis was part of a Western plot to recolonize Asia.