Another budget, more cash handouts and more dithering over an election date
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Similarly, Mr Najib took over after an internal party coup in April
2009 against the then prime minister, Abdullah Badawi. Talk of an early
election for Mr Najib to secure his own mandate first surfaced towards
the end of 2010. He himself began to talk up his chances the following
June. Then an election was expected towards the middle of this year. All
along, Malaysia has been on an election footing, with the cautious Mr
Najib ponderously cultivating the voters.
He has crafted new policies for Malaysia’s younger, unaligned
citizens while giving away plenty of money to retain his party’s
traditional supporters, especially among the ethnic-Malay (and Muslim)
majority. In the budget in late September more cash handouts went to
poorer households and a one-month salary bonus to all government
workers. They usually vote for Mr Najib’s United Malays National
Organisation (UMNO).
Would that there were more to show for all the shadow electioneering.
Opinion polls conducted by the respected Merdeka Centre (the latest
were for June) gave the prime minister an approval rating of 64%, down
from the high point of his popularity in the middle of 2010. Still not
bad, you might think, but the popularity of the ruling coalition, the
Barisan Nasional (BN), is much lower than the prime minister’s own. So
now Mr Najib’s options are diminishing fast. He is required to call an
election by April at the latest. In the process he has acquired a
reputation for dithering, and now has the regrettable distinction of
being Malaysia’s second-longest-serving unelected prime minister, just
behind his own father, the country’s second prime minister.
Given UMNO’s deep pockets and its practice of gerrymandering
constituency boundaries, winning a simple majority has always looked
relatively easy for Mr Najib. After all, the ruling coalition, made up
of UMNO and several smaller parties, has achieved that in every election
since independence in 1957. Yet Mr Najib’s real aim is to win back the
two-thirds majority that the BN lost for the first time at the last
election, in 2008. In so doing the BN lost its power, among other
things, to tinker with the constitution. That failure led directly to
the coup against Mr Badawi and the elevation of Mr Najib. The prime
minister knows that if he fails to reverse the humiliation of 2008, a
genuinely hard task, then he could go the same way as his predecessor.
(His chief protection is that personally he remains more popular than
the BN.)
Mr Najib has also been spooked by a series of political setbacks. His
government mishandled a couple of huge rallies by a coalition of NGOs
called Bersih (meaning “clean” in Malay) campaigning for fair elections.
And poring perhaps too closely over the minutiae of local-election
results, the BN has fretted over a fall in support among Chinese voters.
They form the largest minority in the country’s complex ethnic mosaic.
The problem for Malaysia is that the rival parties have been at such a
high pitch of combat-readiness for such a long time that the resulting
partisanship is poisoning national politics. Pretty murky at the best of
times, politics is becoming dirtier by the day. UMNO and its friends in
the press and television have been relentless in their assaults on any
organisation, such as Bersih, that is deemed to be sympathetic to the
opposition. Another target has been an excellent independent website
called Malaysiakini. All the old canards about these sorts of groups
being in the pay of Zionists, America or George Soros, a foreign
financier, have been trotted out. It is not clear whether such slanders
still impress Malaysia’s voters, especially its Muslims. They are
certainly a sign of desperation.
Original source here | Singapore 6 Oct 2012