The State of the Opposition

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.