8 March: Eclipsing May 13

Postscript: Anwar's Path to Power goes via Permatang Pauh

122 Ooi Kee Beng Postscript Anwar’s Path to Power goes via Permatang Pauh On August 26, 2008, former deputy premier Anwar Ibrahim managed to do what the snap general elections earlier that year had stopped him from doing. He succeeded in returning to the Dewan Negara (Lower House of Parliament) after an absence of exactly ten years. That day, he won the by-election in his home base of Permatang Pauh in the state of Penang, and did it by substantially widening the already impressive margin of victory achieved by his wife Wan Azizah Wan Ismail in the general elections held about six months earlier. This latest triumph is one rung higher in Anwar’s climb towards the pinnacle of political power from which he fell in 1998. Sacked and arrested in September that year by his mentor-turned nemesis, Dr Mahathir Mohamed, Anwar suffered a bad beating while in detention and endured a subsequent humiliating and sordid trial. In 1999, he was sentenced to six years in jail for corruption, and the following year to nine years for sodomy in 1999. He was released in 2004 when the split decision in the Federal Court overturned the latter conviction on appeal. Nevertheless, the prison term disqualified him from running for office until April 15, 2008. Strangely, Prime Postscript 123 Minister Abdullah Badawi, who had won the biggest mandate in Malaysian history in 2004, chose to schedule early elections for March 8, one week before the ban on Anwar to run for office would run out. The nature of Anwar’s by-election success is significant in a number of ways. First, it showed that although voters — at least those in Permatang Pauh — may have been surprised at their own cheek in acting so forcefully against the government in the earlier election, half a year later they were apparently not regretting having made that stand. Second, the by-election was also the first one to be lost, and badly at that, by the formidable electoral machine of the ruling Barisan Nasional (BN) since Abdullah Badawi became premier in 2003. The fall in support for the government seemed to be continuing. Furthermore, Permatang Pauh is a constituency where almost 70 per cent of its constituents are Malays.1 The rest are mainly Chinese, with the Indians, the community most disenchanted with the BN at the moment, making up a mere 5.7 per cent of the voting population. But despite the BN using racial arguments in the campaign and despite the fact that Anwar’s party, the Parti Keadilan Rakyat (PKR), continued to propound a multiracial line,Anwar won almost 70 per cent of the votes. Just as notable is the fact that the United Malays National Organisation (UMNO) made full use of the sodomy charge against Anwar during the campaign period. His former aide, Mohamed Saiful Bukhari Azlan, had claimed that he had been sodomized against his will by Anwar. He then swore on the Quran that his story was true, thus bringing a controversial religious ritual into the basically secular business of voting. 124 Ooi Kee Beng To add to the confusion, deputy premier Najib Abdul Razak also swore in a mosque on August 22 that he had never known the Mongolian woman, Altantuya Shariibuu, who was grotesquely murdered in Kuala Lumpur two years ago.2 His former advisor, Abdul Razak Baginda, is being tried for that crime. Anwar’s camp had been making claims that Najib was in some way involved with the crime. Despite calls to perform a similar ritual as Saiful had done, Anwar refused. Claims that this response would hurt his credibility among Malay voters proved to be unfounded. These events suggest, as a third point, that if issues of race and religion did play a role in the voting, it was as a detriment to the BN. Fourth, Anwar’s candidacy ended Wan Azizah’s tenyear virgil over the seat. She had expressly been keeping it in trust for her husband, almost losing it in 2004 when she hung on to it by a slim 590-vote majority. Fifth, with Anwar’s ascendance to a position of power, the Malay ground may be said to have split into three distinct fragments. UMNO continues to stand for a Malayfirst policy, while Parti Islam SeMalaysia (PAS) propounds a religious basis for the country’s nation building. How Islam is to be defined and how...