For nearly two decades, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) has served as a vehicle for the postsocialist states of Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, and Vietnam (CLMV) to seek diplomatic recognition and enmesh their economies with the dominant discourses, structures, and visions of post-Cold War capitalist modernity. Notwithstanding the ambivalent consequences of CLMV membership for ASEAN, existing studies suggest that the benefits of membership for these newer and poorer states have been starkly apparent: from gaining entry to a panoply of ASEAN driven diplomatic arrangements spanning the Asia-Pacific, and securing leverage in managing their involvements with the Great Powers, to restructuring their regulatory and tariff regimes to accede to the WTO, and, cumulatively, consolidating the bases of regime security. In both scholarly and lay understandings of how CLMV states benefit from ASEAN, then, attention has been firmly on the political, security and economic outcomes of these processes, with diplomacy viewed as a passive instrument to pursue these ends. Such a static view of diplomacy, I argue, obscures a vital mechanism in and through which these broader macro-social changes are being sought and accomplished.

Diplomats and their foreign ministries are not the only actors in the gamut of CLMV-ASEAN involvements and nor are they the final arbiters of foreign policy decision-making. That said, it is instructive to foreground diplomats and diplomacy in the context of ASEAN-CLMV interactions on two counts. First, ASEAN has historically been a prerogative of diplomats and the foreign ministry — from its early beginnings as an exclusively foreign ministry-led process, to contemporary tussles in the age of expansive “community building” where an otherwise weaker foreign ministry wrestles with, if not asserts itself over, other powerful ministries (Defence, Finance) by keeping watch over the procedures and coordination of ASEAN activities.

Second, and more importantly, it is worth emphasizing the irreducibly diplomatic quality of the varied interactions through which official “ASEAN” is produced. Be they diplomats from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA), trade representatives and officials from various other ministries, or leaders at Summits, individuals performing the state must be sited around a meeting table with table-top flags, room flags, and country place cards; must advance “national positions”; and must learn — if not cope — with a putatively “ASEAN Way” of negotiation and decision making.

This chapter will present and interpret the results of the elections of 1959, 1964 and 1969 and show the success of Alliance consociational electoral politics until its collapse in 1969. The Alliance, which saw its birth as a coalition of three ethnic parties in 1955, was able throughout this period to capitalize on its power-sharing arrangements and overcome most of its political opponents until its near defeat in 1969. As shown in the previous chapter, it had tasted success in the 1952 Kuala Lumpur municipal elections and thereafter won every national election from 1955 to 1969. However, the Alliance was unable to maintain its two-thirds control of parliamentary seats in 1969, a year which saw the outbreak of racial riots in Kuala Lumpur. By the beginning of the period, its major opponents, the IMP and Party Negara, were already assigned to history. Then, the parliamentary Left, led by the Socialist Front, mounted a concerted challenge as the main parliamentary opposition, until it chose to opt out of the electoral process, not least of all because of its own internal ethnic divide. It was left to the Malay-based PMIP to become the Alliance's major opponent.

Up until 1969, a path dependence of mediated communal, though elite-managed, consociational consensus was fully established by the Alliance, which remained the dominant ruling coalition throughout this first period of electoral politics after Independence from the British. A particular trajectory of politics may be said to be pathdependent when it exhibits not only immediate returns in political and economic gains but when it also establishes or reinforces institutional arrangements and structures that help to sustain and accelerate such gains. The maintenance of such a system was clearly premised on political investment in institutional arrangements, which largely kept the peace, orchestrated by ethnic elites who dominated their respective parties. Most importantly, attaining the necessary and sufficient conditions of mediated communalism, as expounded in Chapter 1, made for the ruling coalition's electoral longevity. This book posits that such path dependence was indeed generated by the early success of the Alliance in the 1950s and 1960s and reconstituted highly successfully under the Barisan Nasional (National Front) alliance in the 1970s through to the late 1990s. However, a major rupture of this path-dependent success did occur in the 1969 election, as this chapter will demonstrate.

The decline of Mahathir's political leadership appeared to have come as a consequence of the Anwar Ibrahim saga. Although Mahathir was able to lead the Barisan Nasional (BN) to an electoral victory in November 1999, a legitimacy crisis occurred during his tenure. The Anwar saga exposed the dangers and deleterious consequences of party capitalism. Moreover, the emergence of the BA, the alternative coalition, and a host of civil society organizations banding around the reformasi banner and calling for his scalp, clearly left a mortal scar on the Malay leader (Hwang 2003, p. 331). As I have suggested in the previous chapter, UMNO may in fact have lost the Malay vote in 1999; the fact was there was a precipitous slippage to PAS. In September 2000 Mahathir experienced his first international snub when the Islamic Society of North America withdrew its invitation to him to be the keynote speaker at one of its meetings (Maznah 2001, p. 219). On the domestic front another electoral blow came in the Lunas by-election of 29 November 2000. Although this was a mixed constituency in Mahathir's home state, Kedah, it was a People's Justice Party (PKR) candidate who defeated the BN man by 530 votes, showing that UMNO had still not recovered from the poor showing of the last election (Maznah 2001, p. 220). Some relief came to Mahathir only in September 2001 when it became evident that the DAP was in an unhappy marriage with the PAS in the alternative front and quit participating in it.

The woes of party capitalism were far from over, even though Mahathir had apparently steered Malaysia to economic recovery. I have already alluded to the bailouts of Malay businessmen such as Mirzan Mahathir and Tajuddin Ramli. The governmental buyback of Malaysian Airlines, headed by Tajuddin, further eroded Mahathir's credibility. So too did the bailout of alleged UMNO proxy (and Daim's protégé) Halim Saad's Timedotcom by the use of state pension funds (Salazar 2004, p. 288). In fact, Halim's loss-laden flagship, the Renong conglomerate, which had debts totalling RM13 billion, was subjected to a restructuring that saw the removal of its chairman. By June 2001 Daim Zainuddin had resigned from the government, indicating there was a rift among UMNO elites in how to deal with fallen Malay corporate figures.

Following a coronary bypass in February 1981, Hussein Onn resigned as prime minister, after serving only four years in the job. From then on Malaysia's longest-serving premier till date, Mahathir Mohamad, stepped into the breach. In July 1981 the new team of Mahathir and Musa, or the “2-M”, took the helm of UMNO and the reins of the government of Malaysia. These same two people were earlier considered by Tunku Abdul Rahman to be “ultras”, or extremists within UMNO, and were expelled from the party for a time. Much has been written about Mahathir, including books by himself, which this chapter will draw on as may be relevant to electoral politics under his long tenure of twenty-two years as premier. Although Mahathir's premiership lasted from 1982 till 2003, this chapter will only cover four general elections held under his term. The last general election during the Mahathir years was in 1999 — a pivotal election deserving of a more extensive treatment. Thus, following this chapter I will devote the next to the Reformasi Movement and the 1999 election, thought by many to be a transformative moment of Malaysian history.

MAHATHIR AT THE HELM

From the outset I would like to stress that while it is hard to avoid the fact that Mahathir dominated and to a great extent “personalized” UMNO and Malaysian politics (Hwang 2003), this politics was embedded within the discursive and institutional constraints that we have already foregrounded in this book. These constraints are the electoral system and the consociational imperatives of power sharing politics in a multi-ethnic society, overlaid with the often unforgiving constraints of Malay and Islamic politics, which any leader of Malaysia could only eschew at his peril. Furthermore, as we will show in political economy terms, Mahathir was also functioning within the parameters of the country's interventionist developmental state and capitalist system, which he cleverly turned to UMNO's advantage through the practice of “party capitalism”. However, this same factor of party capitalism, with its corollary of corruption and pork-barrel politics, has become UMNO's bane and the potential source of its political decline. We will return to these points in fuller fashion; the analysis in this chapter will cover the first four elections of Mahathir's tenure.

This chapter will examine the origin of Malaysia's first-past-thepost (FPTP) system and the manner in which elections have been conducted. Malaysia, with its unique distribution of ethnic political parties, has a generic FPTP single-member constituency system, which was originally implemented by the British in 1955 at the national level under self-government. After Independence in 1957, following the recommendations of the Reid Constitutional Commission, a federal form of government and elections, based on Westminster-styled institutions, was implemented.

The electoral system is broadly anchored to elements of procedural democracy such as transparent and autonomous electoral institutions and procedures, freedom of political association and campaigning and the like, guaranteed by law and constitutional provisions which devolve duties of conducting elections to an independent Election Commission (EC). By and large the system introduced at Independence in terms of broad procedure and institutions has remained intact. The erosion of some of these constitutional guarantees owing to political developments along with changes and amendments to some of these procedures and the introduction of new elements will be discussed in this chapter.

Malaysia's electoral system as its stands today harks back to the report by the Constituency Delineation Commission for the Federation of Malaya of 1954, headed by Lord Merthyr (hereinafter, Merthyr Commission), which recommended the delimitation of the fifty-two constituencies in Malaya's first federal election of 1955. The report goes into considerable detail in making its recommendations, including the reasons for the adoption of the FPTP single-member constituency model and the reasons for the appropriate system of electoral representation that should be adopted in the then Malayan Federation. The issues of apportionment or distribution of voters and rural weightage and its rationale along with the role and powers given to the EC were arguably the most crucial matters taken up by the Reid Commission. The Reid Commission, which crafted the Malayan Constitution, recommended an electoral system based on that proposed by the 1954 Merthyr Commission, but it was no doubt also influenced by the conduct of the First Election of the Members of the Legislative Council of the Federation of Malaya and the detailed report submitted on it (hereinafter, the Smith Report).

Malaysia's electoral history, if one cared to examine it more minutely, has been strewn with liminal shifts of coalition politics from the 1950s onwards, as I have tried to show in preceding chapters of this book. That said, one major ruling coalition, the Alliance, dominated politics in the 1960s and its successor, the Barisan Nasional, from the 1970s till today. This two-stage movement of UMNO-crafted politics created a path dependence of electoral success that has been difficult to displace. On the other side of the ledger, oppositional coalitions since the 1950s have evinced poor sustenance owing to failures in crafting coalition strategies, particularly with the view to establishing an effective form of mediated communalism for electoral success. Importantly, in the 1960s the leftist coalition of the Socialist Front mounted a veritable challenge and then self-destructed, not without considerable help from repressive actions by the government. Minor electoral pacts followed, but it was only in the 1990s that one saw the formation of fairly well institutionalized opposition coalitions. One such attempt was the parallel formation of Angkatan Perpaduan Ummah and Gagasan Rakyat for the 1990 election, bringing together Muslim and non-Muslim political parties into one electoral pact. A much more formalized coalition in the form of Barisan Alternatif (BA) was cobbled together for the 1999 election and, in 2008 and 2013, the most institutionalized opposition alliance, Pakatan Rakyat (PR), was formulated and remarkably held firm until 2015. This chapter delves into the events that brought an end to Pakatan and touches on how it reconstituted itself as events were unfolding up to early 2016. While the BN was also facing considerable internal strife and intraparty conflicts, there was still no suggestion at the point of writing that it would implode.

POLITICAL DEVELOPMENTS IN 2015

Much occurred on the political stage after the May 2013 general election. As tensions and politicking within the PR reached a crescendo in the middle of June 2015, this led to its formal disbandment. However, some reformulation of the opposition alliance was immediately manifest and its state-run governments appeared intact through coalitional adjustments. I will deal with this development further below, but let me first provide a brief narrative of the seven by-elections that took place after the 13th general election.

This book has presented readers with narratives on Malaysia's electoral politics spanning some sixty years. It has also attempted to explain why one major ruling coalition of parties has dominated elections since Independence. The book suggests that the ethnic power sharing model of the ruling coalition, the Barisan Nasional (BN) — and its predecessor, the Alliance — has been the main reason for such electoral successes for these six decades. Most importantly, the ruling coalition has been able to deploy a strategy of mediated communalism to achieve its electoral success. As noted in the introduction, there have been three phases in the employment of this dynamic strategy of mediated communalism, which is anchored on the consociational pact of a grand coalition of ethnic groups and centripetal stratagems of moderating extremist politics. The three periods are:

1. 1. Emergent Mediated Communalism: 1950s to 1960s;

2. 2. Corporatized Mediated Communalism: 1970s to late 1990s;

3. 3. Contested Mediated Communalism: Late 1990s to 2013.

The book traces the beginnings of the Malaysian electoral system in Chapter 2, which contextualizes how mediated communalism found its salience through the institutionalization of electoral structures within a plural and ethnically divided society. In Chapter 3 the book explored the idea of the onset of an emergent strategy of mediated communalism from the 1950s to the late 1960s and showed how moderate policies of ethnic accommodation bestowed success to the Alliance in elections. Chapters 4 and 5 postulated the entrenchment of a new kind of mediated communalism via Malay primacy and party capitalism from the 1970s till the late 1990s. I have termed this the corporatized phase because of the extensive use of money politics dovetailing with the involvement of BN parties in business. While this particular phase of corporatized politics is clearly identifiable and represented its initial surfacing, there is little doubt that such a form continues to the present day. As noted in the previous chapter, the UMNO crisis of 2015 was partly the result of the use of massive sums of money in the 2013 general election, sourced through a complex web of local and international business entities established by the prime minister and UMNO president. Despite Malay dominance, corporatized politics was a highly successful strategy for the distribution of spoils to all BN parties, and the accommodation of non-Malay interests by the mid-1990s gave the BN its celebrated landslide electoral victory of 1995.

By the time of Malaysia's 10th general election of 1999, there had been two major ruptures in the hegemonic Malay bloc led by UMNO, which I have already discussed in previous chapters. The first was the Tunku's departure from politics after the 13 May riots and the rise of UMNO's young second echelon of leaders who counted among them the irrepressible Mahathir Mohamad, while the second was the 1987 crisis causing the UMNO split and the formation of two new parties, a New UMNO party (UMNO Baru) and the Spirit of 46 party (Semangat 46). This chapter will deal with the third rupture of the Malay bloc caused by the imbroglio around Anwar Ibrahim that erupted in 1998 after his removal from UMNO and as deputy premier. It is interesting to note that all three of these ruptures involved Mahathir. There was great anticipation after this third major rupture, especially in intellectual circles, that such a major crack in the hegemonic edifice of UMNO would augur a real change in Malaysian politics, and much hope was thus placed on a regime change of sorts to be brought about after the 1999 general election. Malaysia had arrived, as it were, at a crucial political crossroads with the eruption of the Reformasi Movement after Anwar's sacking and what many saw as his unjust incarceration on the charge of sodomy. In terms of the larger framing of Malaysian politics, it also seemed an opportune time for social activists to work towards debunking the debilitating model of ethnically overdetermined politics. Indeed, as noted in the previous chapter, the New Economic Policy (NEP, 1971–90) had been brought to a close with the implementation of the National Development Policy (NDP, 1990–2000). The latter, along with the Vision 2020 policy, generated much anticipation that multi-ethnic new politics would take centre stage, especially when the government's stated principal goal was the creation of a Bangsa Malaysia (Malaysian nation).

However, as also noted in the previous chapter, the BN's electoral strategy remained one of mediated communalism, allowing for path dependent success in the elections of 1990 and 1995 in spite of the major split within the UMNO ruling bloc in 1987.

This chapter traces the birth of the Alliance and the establishment of its unique sharing model in the two early pre-Independence elections of 1952 and 1955. In so doing, it will be shown how the Alliance was able to overcome its opponents, particularly the professedly noncommunal forces represented by the Independent Malaya Party (IMP), later Party Negara (PN), and the Islamic and the left-leaning parties. These two early elections paved the way for the Alliance to develop a path-dependent success based on its model of ethnic consociation in subsequent elections after “Merdeka” (Independence) was attained in 1957. In this period of emergent consociational politics, the Alliance was able to establish a first “grand coalition” of the major ethnic groups premised on its basic form of mediated communalism.

In the previous chapter, I sought to establish that Malaysia's electoral system is unique, with its distribution of ethnic political parties and first-past-the-post (FPTP), single-member constituency system. Despite obvious flaws, electoral politics has been broadly anchored to elements of procedural democracy such as transparent and autonomous electoral institutions and procedures, freedom of political association and campaigning, guaranteed by law based on the Constitution. By and large, electoral politics and competition with the oversight of an Election Commission had remained relatively free and fair until the late 1960s. It was only after the 1969 general election, which saw the eruption of racial riots in Kuala Lumpur, that a host of restrictions and constraints were placed on electoral processes and a more authoritarian state structure was instituted. The evaluation of the electoral system by a notable group of Malaysia specialists seems to confirm this broad view:

The 13th general election could be seen as failure for both grand coalitions of the BN and the PR. The BN failed to win as many seats as it did in 2008, indicating that its previously highly successful coalition politics and its strategy of mediated communalism was finally being seriously contested. For the PR, its failure to win the election in spite of its spectacular success in overtaking the BN for the share of the popular vote (of 51 per cent) was an indication that its consociational model was still unable to surpass that of the BN. In a sense, for the first time in Malaysia's history, there was an almost perfect competition between the two rival coalitions, leading to a sort of impasse in terms of electoral outcome.

For some the 13th general election could be interpreted as a “victory” of the people and civil society in that citizens’ political efficacy had never been greater. There were record voter turnouts and civic engagement had surged to its most impressive level, even surpassing that prior to the previous general election. For the BN it was a pyrrhic exercise, given the massive resources expended and the less-than-satisfactory overall returns. Notably, a skewed electoral system, manipulation of voter rolls, unethical electoral practices and outright fraud continue to stymie the movement towards a critical break for a change in the electoral system. It could, however, be hypothesized that the progressive change in electoral dynamics, while affecting ethnic relations marginally, seems to have broken new ground, symbolized by a shift in the national popular vote to the PR for the first time. Against this is the resurgence of the deeply embedded political discourse of Malay supremacy, which is reflexively reinforced by a pivotal Islamic discourse and practice among the Muslim population.

What was evident was that the path dependence of the twincoalition system of the BN and PR was affirmed as the system remained firmly on track. More remarkably, no third parties won any seats at the parliamentary level.

At 3 p.m. on 10 February 2015, Anwar Ibrahim, the leader of the Malaysian Opposition Front, Pakatan Rakyat (PR), was driven in an unmarked vehicle from the Malaysian Federal Court at the Palace of Justice in Putrajaya to the Sungai Buloh prison to be jailed for the second time in his political career. Five federal justices led by Chief Justice Arifin Zakaria unanimously rejected his appeal against a prison sentence of five years for sodomy. The case was a virtual facsimile of his earlier conviction of 1998 when he was sentenced to six years jail but released in 2004 after a federal court overturned the earlier decision. Anwar's incarceration the second time around — indeed, he was detained in 1975 as a social activist too — shows not just the occupational hazard of being a politician in Malaysia but also the extremely high stakes of political contests and outcomes. Malaysia's electoral politics over six decades has seen the tumultuous struggles of political figures, none more prominent than Anwar, to change and drive the country in a more democratic and accountable direction. It has been a politics of repressive tolerance dominated by the ruling coalition of the Alliance and then the Barisan Nasional (BN) after. At the point of writing, the opposition alliance of the Pakatan Rakyat (PR) had twice denied the BN its customary two-thirds command of parliamentary seats and, most spectacularly, won more than 50 per cent of the popular vote in the 2013 election.

This study examines the manner in which Malaysia's multicultural, largely democratic politics have manifested through elections and the factors that drive electoral success and failure. So far there have been thirteen general elections, along with an accompanying number of state elections. The most recent and much anticipated general election was held on 5 May 2013. These elections, the preceding political campaigns and the post-electoral ramifications provide a rich source of materials for the study of procedural and electoral democracy in Malaysia. These two concepts have found their way into the political science literature; the former referring to a process of incorporating technical, transparent electoral procedures while the latter connotes a notion of popular or voter sovereignty.