Former autocrat and self-reinvented democrat Mahathir Mohamad won the 2018 general elections, but less than two years later, the democratic fairy tales ended. In January 2020, under pressure from internal dissenters in his coalition, Mahathir resigned from the government. The old ruling party (United Malay National Organisation, or UMNO) then came back to power in a new political formation. By the end of May 2020, as Mahathir’s political descent continued, he was expelled from the party that he had founded in 2016.
Yet the political genius, who turned 95 in July, has not given up and is continuing to mastermind his way back to power. On October 5, in the midst of a continuing drama among political elites, Mahathir made another U-turn, announcing that he might be (again) running for the next general elections. An election due in 2023 could in fact be called as early as 2021. Could Mahathir come back for a 25th year of rule?
Mahathir ruled over Malaysia for 22 years and resigned in 2003, promising he would never return to politics. Yet the country’s longest serving prime minister never truly left the political scene and continued to express strong opinions through his blog Chedet (a nickname from his school days). He also kept an important role in UMNO, the party he presided over for years and that ruled over Malaysia for 61 years.
Mahathir was, and still is, a controversial leader, perceived in the West as an autocrat famous for his anti-Semitic and anti-Western speeches, most recently by fiercely attacking French President Emmanuel Macron’s criticisms of Islam; he is celebrated in other parts of the world for the same reasons. In Malaysia and beyond, Mahathir is a symbol of the country’s economic successes and its rapid development in the 1980s and 1990s. Despite the contentious politics of his time in office, from his criticism of human rights to his extensive use of patronage, Mahathir has kept a very particular place in Malaysia’s history and in the minds of Malaysians. The younger generation of voters not born during his rule see the man as a wise and experienced leader, and they are drawn to his old patriarchal figure. Older generations have changed their mind over his controversial legacy and, by lack of alternatives, praised his comeback.
In 2016, in an unexpected turn, Mahathir resigned from UMNO and founded a new party (Parti Pribumi Bersatu Malaysia, or Bersatu) with his son Mukhriz and current Prime Minister Muhyiddin Yassin. He also allied with the opposition he had repressed under his rule, led by Anwar Ibrahim. Anwar is the leader of the Reformasi movement, which he created in 1998 after having been sacked from Mahathir’s government. He was then imprisoned on charges of corruption and sodomy until 2004. In 2016, the alliance of the two archenemies came as a surprise to most, in a context where Malaysia’s government was under attack for the involvement of its top leaders, including then-Prime Minister Najib Razak, in the world’s largest financial scandal: the 1MDB scandal.
Taking advantage of a dramatic political scenario, Mahathir reinvented his narrative to present himself as a political messiah with a democratic agenda, to save Malaysia from “Najib’s kleptocracy.” He promised that, if victorious, he would release the leader of the opposition, Anwar, who had been in jail on new sodomy charges since 2015. A pact was sealed between the two rivals, and Mahathir also agreed to hand over power to Anwar within a few years.
In January 2020, power struggles within the ruling coalition — due to Anwar’s eagerness to take over, and Mahathir’s reluctance to let him do so — precipitated what Mahathir coined the “New Malaysia” era to end. The ruling coalition and the entire government collapsed, and with them, Malaysia’s supposed hopes for democracy under Mahathir. His phenomenal narrative did not translate into an effective mode of democratic governance. His political pragmatism did not compensate for his old-fashioned way of rule; nor for the weaknesses of a politically dysmorphic government built on a disparate coalition lacking a clear ideology. While the context of 2018 — characterized by the chaos of the opposition, the pragmatism of desperate leaders, and the frustration of voters — had created a golden opportunity for Mahathir to win that year, these exact same factors (compounded with severe miscalculations and overconfidence) led him to lose power in 2020.
In February 2020, after less than two years in power, Mahathir resigned. While Anwar hoped his time had come to take over, the Malaysian king decided otherwise. In March 2020, to end the feud between Anwar and Mahathir, the king unexpectedly appointed a third man to succeed Mahathir: Muhyiddin Yassin. (Malaysia is a parliamentary monarchy, and the king has the constitutional power to appoint the prime minister from within the parliament majority.) Muhyiddin, then the vice president of Bersatu, became prime minister. In early June, Mahathir was sacked from Bersatu, along with four other leaders, including his son Mukhriz. Muhyiddin, co-founder of Bersatu, could not afford another rivalry from within.
Mahathir’s sacking, and the return of UMNO to the government, created new political shifts. After seven months in power, tested by one of the largest pandemics in recent history, Muhyiddin is now in a difficult position, and Malaysia is in a continuing political crisis. Despite relatively sound management of the crisis, Muhyiddin is probably on his way out. His position in the new government coalition (Perikatan Nasional) is relatively weak vis-à-vis the weight and popularity of UMNO, the old ruling party he allied with. Many in the opposition and in his own party are pushing for his resignation and fresh polls.
