Walski’s Note: Originally published on 17 November 2022 as an X/Twitter thread in four parts, guest writer Mikhail Hafiz‘s essay brilliantly examines the developments in Malaysia’s democratic space. For the sake of continuity and easy reading, it is presented here as a single essay. I have taken some liberty to apply some minor editing (spelling and language), but otherwise, the content presented here is identical to the original threads.
Democracy is the government
Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865)
of the people, by the people, for the people.
The battle for contemporary Malaysia remains a tensile, to-and-fro tussle between two concomitantly contesting political pathways: democratic consolidation and authoritarian expansion. Will either ideological trajectory eventually emerge triumphant?
INTRODUCTION
The end of rebellion is liberation, while the end of revolution is the foundation of freedom.
Hannah Arendt (1906-1975)
On 9 May 2018, Malaysia witnessed its very own Velvet Revolution.
This remarkable, precedent-defying electoral Zeitenwende, which has so far registered the highest reading on the Malaysian political Richter scale, was not attained via battle and bloodshed, but through the long queues at polling stations across the nation, where over 12 million Malaysians lined up patiently to cast their ballots on that fateful day.
As political observers watched the cataclysmic collapse of the hegemonic Barisan Nasional (BN) behemoth unfold with a mixture of surprise and schadenfreude, this historic epochal affirmation of political possibility shattered the seemingly immutable political myth of “the eternal yesterday” that Malaysia would be governed by the same consociational coalition until kingdom come, clearly demonstrating that while the past cannot be dismissed or denied, it does not conclusively define the present, nor does it necessarily dictate the future.
For more circumspect Malaysians, however, this watershed moment marked more than the vanquishment of a truculent, kleptocratic ancien régime, and the culmination of a seismic, albeit glacial, decade-long transition from a one-party state system to its two-coalition counterpart. Most importantly, it signalled the sobering and instructive start of a long and arduous task to steer the wayward and listing state vessel that is Malaysia back on her right course, en route to eventual sovereign maturity, in the hope that she can someday take her place among the great nations of the world as “a beacon of light in a disturbed and distracted world”, just as our founding fathers had envisaged, and to do so unencumbered by the undesirable, uncharitable and unsolicited monikers often ascribed to hybrid regimes.
Unfortunately, this narrow window of opportunity was slammed shut by the Sheraton Move, an abhorrent, baleful, calamitous and dastardly political coup de main that subsequently ushered in Malaysia’s ‘Democracy: Interrupted’ era, and saddled our nation with two consecutive mandate-less and manifesto-less governments in 2020. Two years on, this abominable post-election non-sequitur continues to cast a lengthy and ominous shadow over the integrity of our democratic process.
This brazen and odious legislative volte-fa(r)ce is, in retrospect, hardly surprising. Malaysia’s functional relationship with representative democracy, like that of its regional counterparts, while not quite adversarial, has nevertheless been fraught and troubled: expectantly complex, inherently discrepant and frequently problematic.
As Lindsey W. Ford and Ryan Hass of the Brookings Institution perceptively surmise: “Widespread democratization throughout the 1980s and 1990s shifted the complexion of the region away from its illiberal past, ushering in rising hopes of a democratic wave. In recent years, however, democratic backsliding has shifted the political tides in the opposite direction, leading to a resurgence of illiberalism, and in some cases, rising authoritarianism.” (Brookings Institution website)
Michael Vatikiotis, Asia Regional Director of the Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue, a Geneva-based private foundation that facilitates dialogue to resolve armed conflicts, agrees.
In ‘Blood and Silk: Power and Conflict in Modern Southeast Asia‘, his illuminating 2017 literary offering – ambitious and expansive, yet accessible and engaging – which surveys the power structures that define the region, Vatikiotis concludes that:
“If the 1990s was a decade of reform and political transformation in Southeast Asia, then the first two decades of the twenty-first century have seen disappointing dividends.“
“Across the region, respect for human rights, democracy and popular sovereignty has continued to diminish.”
Troublingly, persistent and protracted political polarisation across ethnic, religious and ideological cleavages, along with the wariness or reluctance of most regional leaders to address the consequential risks of authoritarian political influence, only adds to the complex stresses and strains encountered by Indo-Pacific nations.
While democratic erosion precipitated by harsh political conflict is not yet so debilitating for our nation to be threatened by the spectre of democratic dissolution, political violence, or civil war, the warning signs are nevertheless disquieting. This worrying trend is not only confined to Malaysia but rather, part of a larger regional phenomenon, where deepening divisions, frequently fuelled by partisan majoritarian political agendas, are enabling anti-democratic action, and driving democratic regression in key countries throughout the South and Southeast Asia regions. (Carothers & O’Donohue, 2020)
In our understandable haste and eagerness to embrace (and forge) a more benign democratic rule, we may have unintentionally overlooked a crucial axiomatic tenet of political governance: incumbent turnover is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for regime change.
While it may mark the symbolic commencement of a polity’s transition from competitive authoritarian system to functioning democracy, the alternation of power itself does not necessarily result in the substantive process of democratisation.
As Meredith L. Weiss, professor of Political Science at the University of Albany, State University of New York, asserts in her thoughtful and thought-provoking 2020 opus, ‘The Roots of Resilience: Party Machines and Grassroots Politics in Singapore and Malaysia‘:
“Real regime change (ie, regime restructuring) requires both alternation of power and a change in linkages and governance. The first of these transformations does not necessarily entail the second.“
In this disjointed, discordant, dysfunctional and (temporarily) derailed epoch of constitutional democracy, the only predictable aspect of contemporary Malaysia’s protean political landscape is its very unpredictability.
As such, the reading of political tea leaves in Malaysia’s ‘Democracy: Interrupted’ era is proving to be an extremely imponderable – if not impossible – endeavour, given the incalculable, volatile and dynamic temperament of our local political environment.
Indeed, any idiosyncratic predictions or temporal projections of intra-party, inter-party and inter-coalition elite machinations by the intellectual intelligentsia have come to resemble a Rorschach test of sorts.
In a 2002 article titled ‘Elections Without Democracy: The Menu of Manipulation‘, Andreas Schedler, Senior Research Fellow at the Central European University Democracy Institute, brings clarity to a common misperception linking suffrage to popular sovereignty:
“The idea of democracy has become so closely identified with elections that we are in danger of forgetting that the modern history of representative elections is a tale of authoritarian manipulation as much as it is a saga of democratic triumphs.
Since the early days of the “third wave” of global democratisation, it has been clear that transitions from authoritarian rule can lead anywhere. Over the past quarter-century, many have led to the establishment of some form of democracy. But many others have not.“
Schedler argues, instead, that “[t]hey have given birth to new forms of authoritarianism that do not fit into our classic categories of one-party, military, or personal dictatorship”, and are categorised as “electoral authoritarian regimes”.
As Harvard University political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt incisively observe, in their critically acclaimed and well received 2018 tome ‘How Democracies Die‘, “[t]he tragic paradox of the electoral route to authoritarianism“, while less dramatic in comparison to the military might and coercive forces of a coup d’état but equally destructive, “is that democracy’s assassins use the very institutions of democracy – gradually, subtly, and even legally – to kill it.”
In other words, “[d]emocracy’s primary assailants today are not generals or armed revolutionaries, but rather politicians […] who eviscerate democracy’s substance behind a carefully crafted veneer of legality and constitutionality.” (Levitsky & Ziblatt, 2021)
MALAYSIA: ILLIBERAL DEMOCRACY OR COMPETITIVE AUTHORITARIAN REGIME?
In every age it has been the tyrant, the oppressor and the exploiter who has wrapped himself in the cloak of patriotism, or religion, or both to deceive and overawe the People.”
Eugene V. Debs (1855-1926)
As Marina Ottaway, Middle East Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center, astutely observes in her seminal 2003 tome, ‘Democracy Challenged: The Rise of Semi-Authoritarianism‘:
“They (semi-authoritarian regimes) are ambiguous systems that combine rhetorical acceptance of liberal democracy, the existence of some formal democratic institutions, and respect for a limited sphere of civil and political liberties with essentially illiberal or even authoritarian traits.
This ambiguous character, furthermore, is deliberate.“
It is not without reason that Ottaway, a long-time analyst of the formation and transformation of political systems, pointedly highlights the insidious and sinister intent behind this malignant equivocality:
“Semi-authoritarian systems are not imperfect democracies struggling toward improvement and consolidation but regimes determined to maintain the appearance of democracy without exposing themselves to the political risks that free competition entails.“
In a 1999 working paper titled ‘Challenge of Semi-Authoritarianism‘ for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Ottaway and co-author Martha Brill Olcott remark that while “semi-authoritarian regimes continue to go through the motions of a democratic process,” they have also become “masters at stifling electoral competition or at keeping parliaments powerless and judiciary systems cowed“, and “learned to manipulate public opinion“, shrewdly employing a Janus-faced juxtaposition of claiming that “they are committed to popular empowerment and the redistribution of power” on the one hand, and yet, emphasising “the risks of instability they claim are inherent in untrammeled competition and by doing so succeed in deflecting criticisms and reducing internal pressure for democratization” on the other, combining “formal democracy, a modicum of political openness, and fundamental authoritarian tendencies“. The defining characteristic of such regimes is:
“the existence and persistence of mechanisms that effectively prevent the transfer of power through elections from the hands of the incumbent leaders or party to a new political elite or political organization.” (Carnegie Endowment for International Peace website)
Accordingly, the aim of this illiberalism, as postulated by American academic and author Christopher R. Browning, the Frank Porter Graham Professor of History Emeritus at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, is a ” ‘managed democracy’ [where the public is shepherded, not sovereign,] unchecked by an independent judiciary and untrammeled by the inconvenience of real democratic accountability that comes through the hazard of electoral defeat and alternating parties in government.“
It is this constant and continual “push-and-pull” of antithetical/contradictory political forces between democratic consolidation and authoritarian expansion that continues to generate an as yet unresolved – and possibly even Gordian knot of unresolvable – ideological tension in hybrid regimes.
More often than not, this tension also galvanises various political actors from opposing sides of the political spectrum to adopt more calcified positions; the resultant rigidity only serves to perpetuate the bruising political stalemate and stultifying ideological impasse.
While much scholarly attention has been focused on incumbent turnover as the principal determinant and prerequisite of democratic consolidation, it is imperative to consider three other salient factors that contribute to authoritarian resilience in Malaysia: illiberal democratic practices (gerrymandering, malapportionment) instituted by successive authoritarian governments; authoritarian innovations employed by new configurations of opposition forces; and authoritarian acculturation of the electorate via personalistic politics.
COMPETITIVE AUTHORITARIANISM IN MALAYSIA
The liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerated the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than the democratic state itself. That in its essence is fascism: ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or any controlling private power.
Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882-1945)
Antidemocracy, executive predominance, and elite rule are basic elements of inverted totalitarianism.
Sheldon S. Wolin (1922-2015)
The examination of competitive authoritarianism in Malaysia can be divided into three phases: genesis, evolution and consolidation.
GENESIS: SOFT AUTHORITARIANISM
How did authoritarianism become so inextricably woven into our political tapestry, and so indelibly enmeshed in our social fabric?
It is only apposite that, in seeking to countenance the vice-like grip which competitive authoritarianism continues to exert over Malaysian sociopolitical consciousness, we return to the idiosyncratic circumstances which led to the transformation of an anti-colonial entity defined by its hostility towards Western European imperial powers to a post-colonial polity predicated on the political ideology of popular sovereignty.
In what can arguably be described as a shortsighted miscalculation, an executional oversight or an executional flaw, democratic implements and procedures that were transplanted wholesale to the newly constituted polity of Malaya were ultimately found to be wanting in terms of efficiency and efficacy, due to the failure of our hastily departing colonisers to inculcate a democratic culture among the local population.
According to the eminent scholar of Malaysian politics Gordon Paul Means, the genesis of Malaysia’s bifurcative political system can be traced back to her singular quest for colonial independence, and damage control exigencies of a retreating British empire in the aftermath of the Second World War:
“Instead of gradual transition to democracy and independence, the British were forced into making piecemeal concessions to one ethnic community after another. Therefore, the introduction of democratic institutions was retarded as the British strove to manage rising ethnic conflict by negotiating directly with the leaders of the main ethnic communities. None questioned whether democracy was congruent with “Asian values,” or doubted that an independent judiciary was needed to protect human rights against the sovereign powers of new governments. As a consequence, the wholesale transplanting of British-style democratic institutions was easily accomplished and received wide popular support.“
“The introduction of elections and representative institutions did not produce widespread popular participation in political affairs. Neither the public nor elites had experience with democracy. The colonial system, even in its most benevolent phases, had been highly authoritarian. Each ethnic community supported leaders from traditional status hierarchies or at the apex of various patron-client networks.“
“For all communities, ‘Asian values‘ meant communal loyalty, distrust of government, and avoidance of individual or collective responsibility for wider public interests. Few could acknowledge or empathize with the claims of ethnic communities other than their own. In this climate, elections and parliamentary government became the basis for the rituals of legitimacy, while the habits and attitudes required for a civic culture and participatory democracy went largely uncultivated.”
This disjuncture enabled the incipient seeds of incremental (or creeping) authoritarianism, which were sown during the Abdul Razak Hussein and Hussein Onn premierships, to be nurtured from the first Mahathir Mohamad administration through the Abdullah Badawi and Najib Razak eras right up to the present day.
A democracy is more than a form of government; it is primarily a mode of associated living, of conjoint communicated experience.
John Dewey (1859-1952)
EVOLUTION: INCREMENTAL (OR CREEPING) AUTHORITARIANISM
At this point of the discussion, it is imperative to identify the wide range of political controls instituted by successive BN-led, UMNO-dominated governments that restricted scope for criticism and opposition, thereby favouring the ethnic majority ruling elite. The most comprehensive and extensive powers available to the federal government are provided by Article 150 of our Federal Constitution, pertaining to the proclamation of Emergency.
Other legislative forms of political control include the Internal Security Act (1960) which permits detention without trial (repealed in 2012); The Sedition Act (1948) and The Official Secrets Act (1972) that place far-reaching restrictions on political discussion, and issues that the opposition could raise against the government respectively; the Printing Presses and Publications Act (1984) that controls the press and other publications; the Trade Union Act (1959) to prevent the growth of a strong trade-union movement that might fall under the political influence of the opposition; the Universities and University Colleges Act (1971) to prohibit student participation in local politics (later amended); and the Societies Act (1966) relating to the registration of societies.
The distinguished academic Harold Crouch notes that while “[t]he government’s authoritarian powers were ostensibly acquired to maintain political stability and public order“, they were also in reality “used to preserve the position of the ruling coalition and the dominant faction in its dominant party“. As such, “the authoritarian character of the regime was enhanced incrementally“, in response to various domestic political crises, most notably during the 1969 Emergency, the 1975-1977 UMNO crisis, the 1977-1978 Kelantan Emergency, the 1987 Operasi Lalang, the 1988 UMNO split and judicial crisis, and the 1993 confrontation with the Malay rulers.
This continuing evolution of incremental authoritarianism led Ooi Kee Beng, Executive Director of the Penang Institute, to caution in 2001 that “[a]ny euphoria over the phenomenal growth in economic strength and the increase in national pride must however be balanced by an acknowledgement of the damage that has been done to the democratic traditions of the nation.”
Following the resignation of authoritarian strongman Mahathir Mohamad in 2003, his handpicked successor Abdullah Badawi assumed helmsmanship of the nation, promising not only a wide range of political reforms that included the promise of greater accountability, transparency and a thorough overhaul of key national institutions (civil service, judiciary, police force), but also to be a prime minister for all Malaysians.
Appropriating the informal, avuncular sobriquet of “Pak Lah”, Badawi capitalised on his popularity, burnished by his religious credentials and untarnished reputation, in his congenial appeal for Malaysians to “work with me, not for me“.
Malaysian voters responded rapturously by bestowing the largest ever electoral mandate upon BN the following year, with the coalition winning an overwhelming majority of 198 parliamentary seats, and securing 63.9% of the popular vote.
Sadly, many of the promised reforms failed to materialise. While Badawi and BN were lulled into a soporific slumber by confirmation biased faux reassurances emanating from ever distancing and isolating media echo chambers manipulated by their sycophantic supporters, the increasing friction caused by festering grievances of mainly non-Malays and moderate Malays that had been building up over the last few years, further exacerbated by the belligerent rhetoric and weapon-waving antics of a youth leader during UMNO’s annual general assemblies, eventually ruptured the nation’s political tectonic plates, causing an unexpected and unforeseen electoral earthquake in GE12 (2008); it was a sudden and rude awakening that not only revoked the incumbent coalition’s hitherto unchallenged two-thirds majority – thus circumscribing its unfettered ability to amend our Federal Constitution with impunity – but also handed legislative control of five (later four) state governments to the opposition bloc.
In the final analysis, the Badawi administration, according to academician Farish A Noor, was one that was “long on gimmicks and novelties, but short on substance and delivery“.
Following BN’s dismal performance, Badawi was supplanted by Najib Razak in 2009, who came to power promising reform of our nation’s arcane security laws that impede free speech, and affirmative action policies that privilege the Bumiputeras and marginalise the non-Malays and Muslims but fared no better than his immediate predecessor during his nine year tenure.
Not only did BN fail to regain its much-coveted two-thirds majority, but the coalition also lost the popular vote share for the first time in GE13 (2013). As chronicled by Vatikiotis, “when his legitimacy was called into question after revelations that billions of dollars were misused or went missing from a development fund he managed, Najib veered sharply off the path of reform and began shoring up his position using the tools of despotism and division.“
Indeed, nowhere were Najib’s authoritarian tendencies more pronounced than in his iron-fisted, heavy-handed response to quell public dissent and silence criticism of the 1MDB debacle, as summarised by retired academic Francis Loh Kok Wah:
“[Najib Razak] responded to the deepening scandal by sacking his Deputy Prime Minister and several other ministers when they questioned him on the 1MDB fiasco. He also terminated the services of the previous Attorney General, the previous Governor of Bank Negara and the head of the Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission as they, reportedly, closed in on the case. His new Attorney General then declared that he could find no evidence of corruption and abuse.
Instead, he and other law enforcement agencies charged, imprisoned or took to court Malaysian whistleblowers and others who had persisted in criticising the prime minister.”
Meanwhile, the (alleged) murders of Kevin Morais, Hussain Najadi and Teoh Beng Hock remain quietly unsolved, as do the (en)forced disappearances of Amri Che Mat, Raymond Koh, Joshua Hilmy and Ruth Setapi, cruelly depriving their families of much-needed closure.
CONSOLIDATION: SHERATON MOVE & THE FALL OF NEW MALAYSIA
While PH triumphed against the odds in GE14, despite BN’s distinct advantage in terms of the “three Ms” – (party) machinery, media and money – it appeared to have developed an acute case of political stage fright afterwards.
John Funston, Visiting Fellow in the College of Asia and the Pacific at the Australian National University, notes that “[a]fter a promising start, the Pakatan government soon lost its way. The early stages saw a slew of progressive reforms. Malaysians of integrity were appointed to key government offices. Legal action was taken against corrupt politicians. Human rights issues gained prominence, and media freedom became a reality.” (East Asia Forum)
To complicate matters further, PH inadvertently ceded the national narrative to the newly formed Muafakat Nasional (MN) opposition bloc, which constantly framed the multi-ethnic ruling government and its intended reforms as an existential threat to the Malay-Muslim community.
Promises to ratify the UN International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (ICERD) and the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court were abandoned after the reformist government encountered ferocious backlash from the ethnic majority, in the wake of a vituperative campaign orchestrated by UMNO and Parti Islam SeMalaysia (PAS), the constituent parties of MN, and disparate elements of the political right, to heighten nativist sentiment.
Internecine power struggles and the failure to address several key issues, ranging from the Malay-Bumiputera Agenda and the 1963 Malaysia Agreement (MA63) to political Islam and a clear timetable for transition of power (Chin, 2019), eventually led to crippling defections, which in turn triggered its collapse in February 2020, enabling the hitherto defeated BN to return to federal power in a preponderantly Malay-Muslim coalition that incorporated PAS, Parti Pribumi Bersatu Malaysia (PPBM) and the separatist faction of Parti Keadilan Rakyat (PKR). After being banished to electoral purgatory in GE14, “Old Malaysia” had effectively outmanoeuvred “New Malaysia” and staged a successful revanchist comeback in 22 months.
Having been appointed by procedures that defied Westminster democratic conventions, Muhyiddin Yassin – the newly anointed premier of the Perikatan Nasional (PN) government – then proceeded to govern in a similar manner, by dispensing political largesse to shore up his precarious and unendorsed parliamentary majority, and consolidating his tenuous position through Emergency rule and the prorogation of Parliament.
Democratic decline proceeded apace, as media freedom reverted to the pre-New Malaysia era, while opposition politicians faced an array of legal harassment.
The much vaunted post-Sheraton Move “backdoor government”, the crowning achievement of Malaysia’s ethnoreligious tribalist faction – described by Ooi as “an unholy and unstable alliance” – would, however, turn out to be a short-lived, self-inflicted Pyrrhic victory:
“In 2020, the toppling of the Pakatan Harapan government achieved something Malay supremacists had wanted along – effectively an all-Malay government.
But since the fulfilling of that goal, no significant ideological difference is apparent among the top leaders in PN, UMNO and even the Islamist Parti Islam SeMalaysia (PAS).
To the common man, top-level politics in Malaysia today appears to be about power as a goal in itself – no nation-building vision, no unity programme, and no economic development masterplan that can be taken seriously.“
Hardly surprising then, that in a classic case of “things fall apart, the centre cannot hold”, to quote a line from ‘The Second Coming” by English poet WB Yeats, just as hastily as it had been stitched together, this morally illegitimate and constitutionally questionable government unraveled at breakneck speed, and finally met its ignominious end on 16 August 2021. (see Mikhail Hafiz’s X/Twitter thread from 17 Aug 2021)
UMNO’s audacious power grab notwithstanding, the unlamented demise of this kakistocratic intermezzo is undoubtedly connected to its woeful 17 month performance, as expounded by Bridget Welsh, Honorary Research Associate with the University of Nottingham Asia Research Institute Malaysia: “Muhyiddin’s ‘all Malay’ government gave ethnonationalists what they asked for, and it has not performed. More Malays are taking a hard look at ethnonationalist governance and find it wanting.
Malays have experienced the most COVID-19 deaths and been hard hit by deficiencies in the social safety net. Their views of their leaders are shifting.”
“Government failure has led to a rethink of its role as problem solver. More now see it as the problem and have greater appreciation for the power of action from below.” (East Asia Forum)
Perhaps the most damning indictment of the grand larceny of the GE14 electoral mandate committed by the Sheraton Move conspirators is evidenced in a forcefully articulated argument by intellectual activist Clive Kessler on moral legitimacy (i.e., the right to govern that is predicated upon the results of a free and fair election, as opposed to predetermined selection):
“[E]lections are indispensable and fundamental to representative parliamentary democracy: Not just because, through this device, governments emerge and are installed.
But, more basically and importantly, because it is by means of national elections that the government, the regime it heads and the entire political order at whose apex the government stands, are morally empowered, ‘made legitimate’ “.
In this way and by no other means, our governments are given that special kind of “secular democratic sanctity” that endows modern governments and states with moral authority.
A compelling authority that obliges all citizens to heed their decisions, and so makes government authoritative and effective.” It is a moral and intellectual position that elicits strong support from the East Asian Forum Editorial Board:
“Nobody expects countries like Malaysia or Thailand – let alone even more politically blighted neighbours – to emerge as textbook liberal democracies any time soon. But a mandate earned at the ballot box, once all else falls away, is sacrosanct in even the most flawed democracy.
The least Southeast Asia’s political elites can do for the maturation and legitimacy of democratic norms is to not violate the mandate extended by the voters who handed them government, or to disenfranchise outright many millions of voters who exercise their right to choose differently.” (East Asia Forum)
The sacrosanctity of the electoral mandate as the bedrock of institutional, moral and sovereign legitimacy in an parliamentary democracy is powerfully driven home by Ooi in his blistering denouncement of illiberal democratic practices:
“[I]t is with the free and fair vote that a democratic culture comes into being. That is how notions of fairness penetrate society, and bring dignity to its politics. The integrity of its vote is the measure of a society’s self-esteem.”
“Gerrymandering and malapportionment of constituencies, which are rampant and par-for-the-course in the case of Malaysia, do make elections farcical to a painful degree. When you compromise the egalitarian vote, you compromise the legitimacy of the system, and you damage the reputation of the country. Worse than that, you open a Pandora’s Box of corruption, arrogance, accountability and non-transparency.“
At federal level, the concentration and consolidation of power in the executive branch of Malaysia’s electoral democracy, often at the expense of the legislative, judiciary, civil society, media and press has been achieved through “coercive legalism” by the BN-UMNO state; this predicament may account for the widely held perception of “rule by law” among Malaysians, as opposed to “rule of law“, which connotes a system of constitutional democracy with balances and checks in place, leading critics to designate Malaysia as a “quasi-democracy“, a “semi-democracy”, a “repressive-responsive regime” or even a “statist democracy“. (Loh, 2006)
Malaysia’s (infamous) reputation as a bastion of competitive authoritarianism is reinforced by its “Partly Free” status in the Freedoms In The World index by Freedom House for the last two years. (Freedom House)
The continuing political instability has also led to the expanding political influence of Malaysia’s monarchs, vis-à-vis the constitutional powers invested in the reigning Yang di-Pertuan Agong in the appointment of the Prime Minister and the proclamation of the Emergency.
Additionally, Ford and Haas have observed “[another] worrisome trend across the Indo-Pacific region in the past few years”, which is “the uptick in new legislation limiting individual and civil liberties, placing restrictions on freedom of assembly, civil society organizations, religious institutions, and the freedom of the press.” In many cases, these developments, additionally accelerated by the global CoVid-19 pandemic, “are less of a new trend than a reversion to the mean, with governments turning to familiar illiberal tools and practices in a bid to stifle unrest and prop up their own positions in a more volatile domestic political environment.“
CONSEQUENCES
In a democracy dissent is an act of faith. Like medicine, the test of its value is not its taste but its effects, not how it makes people feel at the moment, but how it inspires them to act thereafter.
Criticism may embarrass a country’s leaders in the short run but strengthen their hand in the long run; it may destroy a consensus on policy while expressing a consensus of values.
Criticism, in short, is more than a right; it is an act of patriotism, a higher form of patriotism, I believe, than the familiar rituals of national adulation.
James William Fulbright (1905-1995)
The enfeebling effects of competitive authoritarianism in Malaysia are most conspicuously evidenced in three areas: strategic economic development; intellectual integrity; and electorate expectation.
STRATEGIC ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT
Sustained economic growth in East and Southeast Asia in the last few decades has led to the emergence of “developmental states”, which are characterised by the strong state intervention, as well as extensive regulation and planning.
There is, however, one significant drawback: it is difficult, if not impossible, for (semi-)authoritarian regimes to maintain or improve their performances as “development states” in the long run.
As Wong Tek Chi, Research Assistant at Australian National University’s Tax and Transfer Policy Institute, eloquently espouses: “Authoritarian order means that a lack of appropriate checks and balances for those in power leaves the system susceptible to corruption.
At the same time, social and economic development gives rise to new needs and demands of accountability and integrity from the public. As a result, political and social tensions emerge.”
Unlike other East Asian developmental states which have either resorted to democratisation (South Korea, Taiwan) or militant elimination of corruption (Singapore) to address this issue, Malaysia is, however, “stuck in the middle.“
He elaborates: “Not only is it in the middle-income trap, but it is also wrestling between authoritarianism and democracy. The quality of its institutions, including its cabinet system, parliament and judiciary, has been on the decline and they cannot mount any effective checks and balances against UMNO, the dominant ruling party. Resultantly, corruption and patronage are widespread in the government.“
“This has serious implications for the economy, particularly when the country is seeking to leave the middle-income trap. To entrepreneurs, rent-seeking is simply more profitable, as reflected by the fact that most of the wealth of Malaysian billionaires is created in rent-heavy industries, like banking, construction, housing development and resources. All of these forces are embodied in the recent 1MDB scandal.“
Wong goes on to point out that “[i]f there is one lesson we can learn from South Korea and Taiwan, that would be democratisation can help to change the underlying political structure and strengthen the quality of the state. Through intensified political competition and appropriate checks and balances, the public can put more pressure on those in power to be more accountable and focus on economic development.“
INTELLECTUAL INTEGRITY
One of the most disturbing developments in both the New Malaysia and ‘Democracy: Interrupted’ eras has been the ascendancy of “intellectual authoritarianism” in the form of constitutional charlatanism and revisionist historicism, propagated by a congerie of intellectually dishonest ethnoreligious chauvinist academicians through our institutions of formal learning, in their conscious and concerted attempts to subvert and subjugate our Federal Constitution and national history.
The disdain and contempt for such feckless and flagrant assaults on Malaysian constitutionalism is elegantly enunciated in an elucidative exposé by constitutional law specialist Mohd Nazim Ganti Shaari: ‘The Deep State in Academia’, his aptly titled riposte, is as much a robust rebuttal of spurious (re)interpretations to our supreme law of the land – “peculiarities” he contends that “any first-year law student studying constitutional law could easily tell […] is a form of academic fraud” – as it is a lacerating critique of the perpetrators’ bald-faced attempts to propagate such pernicious promulgations, in the perverse spirit of bad faith (mala fide) and bad taste.
Tellingly, Mohd Nazim notes that “[t]he academics who have been diligent in participating in this exercise of disinformation have never bothered to disclose the whole truth regarding the subject matter at hand“, nor has there been “any active effort from our universities to counter the misrepresentation and disinformation that has been spread out by these academics“. (Malaysiakini)
Similarly, influential scholar-historians Barbara Watson Andaya and Leonard Y. Andaya, in the preface to the third edition of their celebrated classic, ‘A History of Malaysia‘, note with consternation, that revisionist historians appear to be viewing our national history through an inverted telescope, thus engendering a distorted reality, and engaging in historical denialism:
“[I]t is disturbingly apparent that various groups in Malaysia are interpreting and presenting the past through approaches that serve their own agendas, and that many of these a-historical reconstructions are being incorporated into popular understandings.“
Their grave and justifiable concerns that such subversive acts could conceivably lead to an epistemic crisis are echoed by local academic Ranjit Singh Malhi, who lambasts the authors of current Malaysian secondary school history textbooks for being biased and inaccurate, pointing out that such ethnoreligious tribalist inflected tomes are not only overwhelmingly Malay and Islam-centric, but also omit key facts relevant to nation-building while including factual distortions and exaggerations.
According to Malhi, “[t]he glaring defects in the current history textbooks only confirm the bias of the writers”, whom he notes are mostly Malay, adding that “[t]hey do not provide an adequate, balanced and fair account of the emergence and growth of Malaysia’s plural society.” He continues: “Our young are not being taught the real and inclusive history of our nation but a conscious selected historical narrative skewed towards establishing Islamic and Malay dominance based upon the divisive concept of ‘ketuanan Melayu’.” (Free Malaysia Today)
These intellectual delinquents, aided and abetted by an unsavoury panoply of sanctimonious, sabre-rattling ethnoreligious tribalist warlords and partisan editorial warlocks, appear to have no moral or ethical quandaries about peddling hoary myths to the naive and gullible, or weaponising our nation’s foundational fairy tales against the most vulnerable segments of the population.
Consequently, the Malay-Muslim polity has lived in a protracted and fabricated fear of marginalisation and eventual displacement in their own country, due to the exclusionary and sinister political machinations of these myth-makers and manipulators within their own community.
It is this maleficent combination of misinformation, disinformation and malinformation, perpetrated and perpetuated through rumour mongering, fear-baiting and hate-inciting by such orchestrators of falsehoods, that continues to fuel the siege mentality among the ethnic majority.
ELECTORATE EXPECTATION
Competitive authoritarianism in Malaysia also entrenches authoritarian acculturation* via politician-voter linkages generated through patronage and clientelism.
(*Authoritarian acculturation is defined as the process by which citizens become acclimated over time to a particular mode of politics, conditioned by the nature of competition and the structure of both political parties and civil society.)
According to Weiss, “Malaysia’s dominant parties have informally institutionalized premises for accountability and loyalty oriented more around local outreach and management than national politics.
How closely these efforts touch citizens’ lives, as well as the resources they require, makes alternatives difficult for challengers to develop or citizens to trust; voters come to see the party in office not as modular and replaceable, but as built-in and inevitable.“
Voters who, ceteris paribus, continue to reap substantial material benefits of long-established symbiotic relationships with the incumbent government, and thus prioritise such personalistic linkages over programmatic ones, may not be easily or successfully persuaded to switch allegiances and throw their (collective) electoral weight behind a new challenger if they do not receive adequate reassurances of equivalent patronage from the latter.
As Weiss and co-author Sebastian Dettman trenchantly observe, in a 2018 article titled ‘Has Patronage Lost Its Punch in Malaysia?’, “democratic accountability rests less on an overall progress towards promises of economic growth, social welfare, or other public goods, but more on the exchange of votes for payments or particularistic benefits,” which is predicated on a distinctive mutually beneficial arrangement: each side “supplies something the other needs and cannot independently acquire.“
It is this peculiar feature that allows “intensive personal relationships between citizens and politicians [to act] as substitutes for responsiveness via elections and responsible party government.
Citizens with limited chance to hold their government responsible for promises and policies could still demand that their individual legislators do their best for their districts.“
(Whether elected legislators actually possess the political acumen and skill set to formulate policy, or compensate for their ineptness through political patronage, as discussed by Welsh in a BFM radio in 2021 is, of course, another matter.)
“What most clearly reveals the salience of clientelist linkages in Malaysia“, according to Dettman and Weiss, is the extent to which elected representatives at both federal and state level “constantly embed themselves in the lives of their constituents.“
Weiss herself points out, somewhat pessimistically, that “[t]he prospect of renovating both the institutional framework and the premises for governing is […] daunting“, as “the long history of electoral authoritarianism […] has changed the nature of politics through interventions in national policies, the structure of local governance, and the nature of linkages between politicians and voters“. She concludes that “[o]n balance, the implications of the entrenchment of nonideological, substantially clientelist, machine politics are suboptimal”, as it “impedes real pursuit of new ideas or policy objectives by aligning voters’ and politicians’ interests in purposefully narrow terms. It perpetuates piecemeal and likely inefficient allocation of resources, from national policy initiatives to the grassroots level.“
ADDENDUM
To add insult to the proverbial injury, democratic contraction is further intensified by what Vatikiotis identifies as the imperilment of pluralism in Southeast Asia:
“The problem is that pluralism, with its comforting notion of togetherness even without integration, is being replaced by identity politics, where lines of race and religion are clearly drawn and used as battle lines to secure and protect political power. This in turn is generating tension, and at times violence.“
“Democracy and decentralisation has tended to sharpen the boundaries of faith and identity rather than blur them.“
“This is because political parties appeal to issues of race and religion to garner votes rather than presenting platforms based on inclusive social and economic development.“
“The colonial powers used strict lines of racial division to control exploited populations, thus bequeathing the region disintegrated societies at the birth of modern nationhood.”
It was the intentional and premeditated geographical, economic and social segregation of the Chinese “sojourners” from the local population that informed the colonial policy of “divide and rule”, since the colonisers did not regard the Chinese as belonging to the local society, regardless of their length of domicile. Unsurprisingly, these attitudes were passed on to the natives, too.
Due to this British penchant for divide-and-rule as a standard solution of imperial governance, “[m]odern Malaysia […] remain[s a] prisoner of this colonial legacy of pluralism, which helps to explain some of the contemporary social pathology and how it is manipulated.” Vatikiotis contends that non-Malay races are vilified ad infinitum – and, one might add, ad nauseum – as an existential threat to Malaysia’s ethnoreligious majority by their leaders, and thus require protection from the latter, “just as the colonial rulers offered privilege and protection to the Malays to keep them from bonding with the Chinese and Indian labourers and questioning the colonial order. This very much old pluralism in a new guise.” (New Mandala)
Indeed, it would not be unreasonable to postulate that British imperialism and colonialism by proxy, the former’s immediate successor and locally-domiciled step-sibling, are essentially two faces of the same coin: different actors, same modus operandi.
In ‘Spectre of Comparisons: Nationalism, Southeast Asia and the World‘, a series of profound and eloquent essays that explain how nationalism shaped the political and cultural landscape of Southeast Asia, renowned Anglo-Irish political scientist and historian Benedict Anderson (1936-2015) asserts that this legacy of colonial racism lives on throughout post-colonial Southeast Asia, for such attitudes inform the formation of incumbent majority coalitions, in their quest to consolidate an ever-strengthening hold on power.
Tragically, the corrosive consequences of entrenched authoritarianism in Malaysia and its ripple effects were portentously prophesied by identity politics scholar Kikue Hamayotsu as far back as 2012:
“The tragedy of Malaysian authoritarianism is that authoritarian rule has grown stronger alongside the growing dominance of UMNO in BN and the Malaysian polity as well as its avidly pro-Malay and pro-Islam characters throughout 1980s and 1990s.
The highly politicised identities – and state, political, economic and socio-cultural institutions created to serve the identity-based interests over several decades – will not easily go away even if regime change rids Malaysia of authoritarian rule and the BN falls from power.
Popular interests and demands will continue to be defined and organised through collective identities based on ethnicity, religion, culture, or some combination of these characteristics.“
“This situation will lead to another tragedy: a tragedy of Malaysian democracy and regime change. As a result of the institutionalisation of politicised identities, demands for democracy, freedom and equal rights for all Malaysians are readily interpreted in zero-sum terms to connote a reduction of the special rights and privileges preserved for the Malay-Muslim majority. Regardless of whoever takes over from BN, the new regime will have to negotiate and balance contending communal demands and interests.”
“Regime transition means that UMNO will be in the opposition. It is not unlikely that UMNO elites will use […] racist rhetoric and movements more freely and aggressively to regain power they have lost, deteriorating already uneasy ethnic relations even further.“
REMEDIES
The death of democracy is not likely to be an assassination from ambush. It will be a slow extinction from apathy, indifference, and undernourishment.
Robert M. Hutchins (1899-1977)
Democracy cannot succeed unless those who express their choice are prepared to choose wisely. The real safeguard of democracy, therefore, is education.
Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882-1945)
If we subscribe to the notion that political governance in Malaysia is skewed in favour of unapologetic authoritarianism, what initiatives can be undertaken to arrest the unrelenting, turbulent waves of democratic degradation and stem the surging tide of authoritarian expansion?
Can our democratic decay be halted, and subsequently, reversed? If so, how can the state, civil society and citizenry counter such nefarious attempts to dismantle the guardrails of democracy?
It is humbly submitted that a bifurcative stratagem of reform and education can be employed to address both the short-term and strategic consequences of competitive authoritarianism.
Levitsky and Ziblatt counsel that while the pushback to authoritarian expansion should undoubtedly be muscular, it should also seek to preserve, rather than violate, democratic rules and norms.
Redoubtable academic and farsighted political scientist Wong Chin Huat of Sunway University outlines three pragmatic and feasible institutional reforms that are indispensable in the dismantling of authoritarianism:
“First, civil and political liberties must be reinforced to emphasise the freedoms of expression, assembly and association”, which are enshrined in Article 10 of our Federal Constitution.
“Second, there must be juridical and prosecutorial reforms regarding the appointment, promotion and retirement of judges as well as the establishment of an independent prosecution separate from the attorney general.”
“Third, political impartiality of the state apparatus – bureaucracy, police and the military – must be enforced. State agencies and officials must be checked by independent anti-corruption and ombudsman institutions with real regulatory teeth.“
Wong acknowledges that “[s]uch reforms may produce a majoritarian democracy, but leaves the risk of democratic winner-takes-all politics which will likely further tear at Malaysia’s bipolar social wounds.“
As such, two additional institutional reforms are needed to dismantle majoritarianism: “First, electoral, parliamentary and cabinet reforms must be enacted – this includes a more proportional electoral system and a term limit on prime ministership.
Powers need to be devolved to the states, the senate should be directly elected and local elections restored. These reforms will end a concentration of power at the top of the leadership, the root cause of the 1MDB scandal.“
“At the same time, [the incumbent opposition] should also promise to avoid sweeping change without national consensus on divisive issues like the pro-Malay ethnic preferential policy, Islamisation as well as language and education. These issues should be deliberated by broad-based consultative bodies to produce new policy alternatives, which may be modified to become party manifestos in the 15th General Election (GE15).” (East Asia Forum)
It would also be prudent to consider the role of education in the cultivation of a substantive democratic culture by addressing the concerning issue of political illiteracy in the younger generation.
Political anthropologist Sophie Lemiere, an Adjunct Fellow at the Center for Strategic Research and International Studies (CSIS-Washington DC), notes that “[l]ong-term initiatives targeting youth civic education are urgently needed in both English and vernacular languages“, as “[g]eneral knowledge about democratic values is poor in Malaysia and the universality of these values is sometimes contested. There is also a need for more civic education focused on equal rights (gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity, etc.) and the inclusion of minorities and vulnerable populations that often remain outside of the Malaysian policy debates and are ignored in the general discourse on democracy.“
On the other side of the pedagogical equation, Lemiere believes that “Malaysia’s democracy would also benefit from stronger support for outside voices such as journalists and academic researchers“, since “Malaysia’s low levels of civic awareness and the absence of public debates about democratic principles is partly due to censorship and self-censorship, but also to tie limited training offered to journalists and/or political commentators.”
“In Malaysian academia, while there are researchers conducting excellent research, they often lack external funding. This dependence on public funds tends to subject them to administrative and political constraints.” (Brookings Institution website)
In an interview with Mitja Sardoc of the Educational Institute of Slovenia, Amy Gutmann, author of the seminal 1987 book length feature ‘Democratic Education’, which addresses two crucial educational questions – why and how should democracies educate free and equal citizens, and who should be authorised to do so – emphasises the importance of both democratic education and democratic deliberation as central elements of public education in a plurally diverse polity:
“A democratic citizen enjoys liberty, opportunity, and the respect of others, which she reciprocates. These three core democratic values – liberty (personal and political), opportunity (education, healthcare, security), and mutual respect among persons […] are not self-evident or self-perpetuating. They must be carefully taught or else opposing values – authoritarianism, plutocracy, intolerance, bigotry and hatred – will dominate in our societies.“
DEMOCRATIC PUSHBACK IN AN ILLIBERAL AGE
Discourse and critical thinking are essential tools when it comes to securing progress in a democratic society. But in the end, unity and engaged participation are what make it happen.
Aberjhani
William Case, Head of the School of Politics, History and International Relations at the University of Nottingham Malaysia, duly notes that “the record of governance and judicial independence remained mixed in 2021.“
While “[t]he courts [have] dropped sundry prominent cases over corrupt payments and tax avoidance“, delivering what he regards as “a sheepish judgement of ‘dismissal not amounting to acquittal’“, it does not necessarily “signal the weakening of governance in Malaysia,” as “Najib’s conviction on 1MDB corruption charges were upheld in December by the Court of Appeals.“
However, the Federal Court’s recent unanimous decision to uphold the conviction has, according to Lee Hwok-Aun, Senior Fellow with the Malaysia Studies Programme and Regional Economic Studies Programme at the ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute, “restored confidence in this key national institution“, although “Malaysia’s judicial consolidation shows that the road to reform is long, often winding, and far from complete.”
“Will the judiciary’s stand have lasting impact? Unlike the Najib verdict, what happens next is anything but simple and straightforward. The question is whether Malaysia pivots for good.” (FULCRUM)
Fellow academic Bjorn Dressel concurs: “The verdict, remarkable in its clarity and assertiveness, focuses the spotlight on the Malaysian judiciary – an institution long thought to have succumbed to the executive.
More than five decades of UMNO party dominance and the constitutional crisis in 1988 raised doubts about the independence and professionalism of the judiciary – particularly in high-profile cases.” He adds: “Najib’s conviction has sent a clear signal that Malaysi’s judiciary led by Chief Justice Tengku Maimun is re-asserting itself as an independent institution. But whether Malaysia’s judges can stay the course is not yet clear.” (East Asia Forum)
Also, despite the general sense of despondency and despair demonstrated by an electorate that has not only succumbed to political fatigue, but also continues to be antagonised and agitated by the dubious, dithering and diabolical leadership displayed by the current cadre of political elites, another sliver of hope has emerged amidst the pervading gloom. As Welsh acutely observes:
“In the cloud of negativity surrounding political developments over the past 2 years, there is little appreciation of what is going right in Malaysian politics. There are elements of democracy taking root, with all of their messiness and uncertainties.“
Among the positive changes is a strengthening of some of Malaysia’s political institutions, notably Parliament. Inside the legislature, there are marked improvements in consultation, transparency, inclusiveness of stakeholders and even, the quality of debate.“
While mainstream media attention has been focused on legislation targeting the participation of students in politics, extension of suffrage to a younger generation of first-time voters, the securing of accountability from renegade lawmakers for their party-hopping antics, the provision of proper protection and redress for victims of sexual harassment, and the restoration of East Malaysia’s special position within the Malaysian Federation, encouraging progress has also been made in a range of lesser known and publicised issues, from migration and intellectual property to social security for homemakers.
“Whether this more responsible law-making and reform of Parliament are sustainable is not clear”, Welsh concludes, but “when one looks back on this period in Malaysian history, the changes in Parliament are bright spots deserving recognition.” (Between The Lines)
CONCLUSION
Man’s capacity for justice makes democracy possible, but man’s inclination for injustice makes democracy necessary
Reinhold Niebuhr (1892-1971)
A great democracy has got to be progressive or it will soon cease to be great or a democracy
Theodore Roosevelt Jr (1858-1919)
While our political establishment continues to be dominated by unsavoury actors who bear more than passing resemblances to the villains that populate various Shakespearean dramas (King Lear, Macbeth, Brutus and Iago, just to name a few), Malaysia’s current political climate, metaphorically speaking, more accurately resembles that of the Weimar Republic in the early 1930s, in the lead up to what promises to be an eventful, and possibly even fratricidal and purgative GE15.
Life is most definitely not a cabaret, old chum.
Has Malaysia’s democratic recession degenerated from a showpiece of the “théâtre of the absurd” to a Shakespearean tragedy of epic proportions? Will our hopes for democratic consolidation remain as futile as Samuel Beckett’s ‘Waiting for Godot‘?
Will a multifarious (and multicultural) Malaysia, a regional constituent of what the American journalist Stan Sesser described as “The Lands of Charm and Cruelty” in 1993, become increasingly muzzled or muted, and consequently, more monochromatic?
Or will Malaysia, just like other countries around the world, continue its intermittently interrupted yet inexorable march towards what renowned American political scientist Francis Fukuyama believes to be the apotheosis of humankind’s ideological evolution – liberal democracy* – in lockstep to the beat of the Reformasi drum?
(*Fukuyama defines liberal democracy in the following terms: “liberal insofar as it recognizes and protects through a system of law man’s universal right to freedom, and democratic insofar as it exists only with the consent of the governed.”)
Will our frequent forays into the realm of authoritarian expansion merely serve as diversionary detours on the perilous route to consolidated democratic stability?
Also, will Malaysia prove to be an increasingly fertile ground for the embryonic buds of deliberative democracy – an approach to political decision-making that places emphasis on inclusive, reflective, and other-regarding discussion – to germinate and multiply, in order to function as a countervailing force against erstwhile established elite deliberation, despite Southeast Asia’s uncharitable reputation as a region often associated with authoritarian resilience and democratic decline?
As the current electoral cycle approaches its truncated denouement, will a keenly contested and inevitably combative electoral tempest that is GE15 mark the definitive end of an epoch indelibly characterised by turbulent political disarray and the arrested development of democratic consolidation?
Only time will tell.
As we peer into the blackened heart of Malaysia’s darkened democracy and ponder its inscrutable future, our nation’s confounding and crippling political sclerosis finds its ideal idiomatic expression in the veritable words of the quintessential Italian thinker Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937):
“The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.“
To which I would add: the most significantly morbid symptom of the interregnum that is Malaysia’s blighted ‘Democracy: Interrupted’ era of disordered politics, is the conjuring of not just one, but two consecutive lumbering and moribund otherworldly political creatures that should never have been willed into existence in the first place.
Meanwhile, the disheartened, disaffected, disenfranchised and disenchanted can perhaps seek succour and support in the words of American poet Langston Hughes (1901-1967) as they continue to hold out for a more democratic, egalitarian and progressive Malaysia:
“Hold fast to dreams
For if dreams die
Life is a broken-winged bird
That cannot fly.
Hold fast to dreams
For when dreams go
Life is a barren field
Frozen with snow.“
And so:
Quo vadis, Malaysia?
myAsylum 
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