Malaysia Matters Podcast

Interesting commentary from Mushtak Parker in Arab News.  Parker gives a background to the current upheaval:

On Aug. 26, Anwar, the controversial former deputy prime minister and finance minister under Mahathir Mohamed, returned to mainstream politics after winning an expected landslide by-election in the Permatang Pauh constituency which was vacated by his wife Wan Azizah Ismail. For almost a decade, Anwar was in the political wilderness and banned from active politics following his conviction on corruption and other charges, some of which were overturned on appeal. The real reason was that he tried to oust Mahathir in an attempted palace coup which backfired badly, suggesting Anwar’s political inexperience and poor judgment, especially in selecting his close advisers, who seemed to be more interested in instant power and money than the interests of the Malays, Malaysians and the country in general.

Anwar is a fiery orator, who uses to tremendous advantage the skill of speaking honed during the days of his youth when he was the leader of the Malaysian Muslim Youth Organization (ABIM), which had close ties with Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood.

Although critical of the ruling party, Parker also cautions against buying into the hype and propoganda:

However, there is a lot of misinformation and hype on all sides. On the economy, for instance, the fundamentals and statistics show that the Malaysian economy, despite the credit crunch, is faring much better than the government’s critics suggest.

[. . .]

Today will show that Anwar will fail to deliver his ultimatum or pledge, which will be discarded to the scrapheap of political hot air. In Malaysian politics, Anwar may have stirred a hornet’s nest. But the reality is that most Malaysians remain ambivalent about him. More worrying for him is that, in a recent poll, more than half of the Malaysians surveyed did not support him or were not satisfied with his performance as opposition politician. Similarly, perhaps more significantly, many Malaysian youth remain unswayed by Anwar, who after all is in his sixties.

As Josh has noted, a ruling party with the Islmacist PAS at its heart is very troubling.  In addition, Malaysia is an important trading partner with the US and Anwar’s troubling anti-American and antisemitic conspiracy theories don’t bode well for that relationship.

Anwar is clearly skillful at political theater, but at some point theater has to give way to substance. He is seeking to ride a wave of emotion into power, but we would be smart to think long and hard about what this would mean in practice.