graveyard of politics

Malaysian Voters lastly are no longer afraid to support the opposition of Barisan Alternative of Malaysia

THERE was no grandstanding on tanks; no sea of banner-waving protesters in monochrome T-shirts; not even a change in the federal government. Yet Malaysia underwent a quiet revolution on March 8th. The political scene transformed itself overnight. That the change happened at the ballot box and not in the street makes it all the more cheering.

For 50 years since independence, Malaysia has been ruled by a coalition dominated by the United Malays National Organisation, or UMNO. Malaysia has prospered wonderfully, and the arrangement seemed immutable. Not any more. The governing coalition, the National Front, won the election for the federal parliament and eight of the 13 state assemblies easily enough (see article). But in a huge swing it lost the two-thirds majority in Parliament that it has enjoyed for 40 years, and which enabled it to change the constitution at will. In peninsular Malaysia (ie, excluding Malaysian Borneo), it actually—if narrowly—lost the popular vote. In five states, including the most populous, the opposition will form the government.

This is extremely good news for many reasons. The most basic is that democracies need a vibrant and credible opposition. Any party that stays in power for half a century is liable to show signs of complacency, arrogance and corruption, and UMNO is no exception. Abdullah Badawi won by a landslide in 2004, partly because of a promise to clean things up. Voters have turned against him not least because he is seen as having failed, or—worse—as not having even tried hard.

Second, the election result is a victory for hope over fear. At times the government has used harsh laws against opponents. Anwar Ibrahim, the leader of what is now the largest opposition party, and Lim Guan Eng, the new chief minister of the state of Penang, have done time in jail. More generally, the National Front has played on the fears evoked by the ghosts of 1969, when opposition advances at the polls were followed by bloody race riots. A vote for the opposition, went the none-too-subtle message, would risk bloodshed as the Malay majority took its revenge on the minorities. Yet it was not only many ethnic-Chinese voters (about a quarter of the population) and, especially, disgruntled ethnic Indians (about 8%) who deserted the National Front. Many Malays switched too.

That is a third reason for optimism: communal tension may not be the tinderbox that Malaysia has for so long assumed it to be. If so, the result may herald new thinking about the institutionalised racism of the pro-Malay affirmative-action policies introduced after 1969. The opposition parties campaigned on a platform of “colour-blind” affirmative action—help for those who need it, not for a particular ethnic group. In the past, that would have been deemed electoral suicide. Surely Malays would not vote against their own economic self-interest? In the event many seem to have recognised that the policy has become less a means for redistributing wealth to the disadvantaged than a vehicle for corruption and cronyism.
And now revolve even more, please

Of course, the opposition still has a long way to go. It is a loose coalition of ill-matched parties: a left-of-centre, mainly ethnic-Chinese one; an Islamist party that in the one state it has ruled since 1990 has banned unisex barbers and introduced single-sex tills in supermarkets; and Mr Anwar's multi-ethnic liberal reformers. They may make a mess of governing the states they have won, or prove as venal as those they have replaced. They have co-operated well in opposition: the Islamist party has moderated its demands, so as not to scare off the Chinese and Indian supporters of the other parties, and they made good tactical choices about who should contest which seat. But by the time of the next election, they will need to win votes as a potential government, rather than as a symbol of protest.

Or perhaps by then UMNO and the National Front will have reformed themselves. The first signs were good. Mr Badawi accepted the setback with grace. Opposition leaders avoided gloating and told their supporters not to celebrate in the streets lest they provide an excuse for troublemakers. Such maturity and restraint may not last. But in a region where competitive politics are so often feared because they are associated with instability, they offer a beacon of hope.