Towards the end of our time in Malaysia we spent a day
visiting representatives from the three political parties which make up to
opposition group which has been in turmoil following the last election in 2013.
There are three parties which represent very distinct and, sometimes opposing
interests within the coalition (called the People's Alliance). The first is PKR
or the Social Justice party, which is primarily urban and Malay. The opposition
figurehead, Anwar Ibrahim, comes from this party which started as a split from
the ruling UMNO party over differences of opinion about greater democratization
and the retrenchment of the Bumiputra laws. There were also further differences
over the speed and implementation of Hudud (Islamic corporal punishment), which
in turn led to the breakdown of the opposition coalition. We met with one of
the new faces in the PKR, Nural Izzah Anwar who is presently (arguably) the
de-facto opposition leader. She is the daughter of Anwar Ibrahim who is
presently in prison on Sodomy charges, which according to many sources may have
been a coordinated sting by the ruling party in order to defang the opposition
after the elections. While she remained upbeat about eventual change in
Malaysia she iterated several time that the government was using its influence
in order to destroy the movement in its current form. She pointed out that
police officers, who heavily support the ruling party of UMNO get to vote in
the district they patrol rather than where they live, and that the government
has drawn voting districts in such a way as to allow rural voters to outweigh
their urban counterparts. It worth noting that this was at least partially
responsible for the defeat of the People's Alliance in the last election;
although the coalition won an absolute majority of the popular vote in 2013, it
got around a third of the seats. UMNO, which won around 47% of the vote picked
up two thirds of the seats.
The second group was the mostly-Chinese DAP, or Democratic
Action Party They have a large presence in urban areas and some MPs in Sabah
and Sarawak. Because they are a primarily Chinese party they were far more dedicated
to a secular Malaysia than any primarily Malay party. The representative we met
with included Dr. Ong Kian Ming and Teresa Kok both sitting members of
parliament for the DAP. I was surprised to learn that Dr Kian Ming had gone to
school with one of my professors, Jie Lu, at Duke. I promised I would get back
in touch with him regarding a position at the Penang Institute in the spring,
he said it was certainly possible and that the institution does accept foreign
applicants. The two representatives were especially concerned about the
creeping "arabization" of Islam in Malaysia and that the Chinese
community was afraid it would be caught in the race between UMNO and PAS to
capture the Muslim vote by enacting strict laws, dress codes, and restrictions
on the way non-Malays may practice their faith.
Lastly we met with PAS, the Islamic Party, which is
presently undergoing extreme turmoil and is about to fracture into two separate
parties. The constituency of PAS is primarily northern, rural, conservative,
and staunchly religious. Yet many elites within the party are wary about
attempting to implement Hudud before the government has been unseated. The new
generation of party leaders is more gung-ho about the implementation of Islamic
Law and this has been the cause of a major split in the party, and resulted in
many of the older generation of PAS activists deciding to split off after the
new leadership wanted to align itself with UMNO on the matter.
The Opposition, it seems, is as deeply divided as the nation
itself. The next election, and maybe the future of the country, depends on
whether or not the opposition coalition can come together.
