After a five-day deadlock, the Council of Sultans has chosen Malaysia's new prime minister. An overview of the most complex election ever held in the country

Malaysia has a new premier. It took five days, hours of consultations and the intervention of the sultan before the results of the 15th general election were (for now) crystallised. On Thursday 24 November, the current monarch Sultan Abdullah Sultan Ahmad Shah convened a special meeting with his counterparts from the nine Malaysian states (an overview of the sultans' rotation system here) and made the final decision. Normally, the Yang di-Pertuan Agong plays a representative role, but can intervene in situations of emergency or uncertainty, as happened in recent days.

Malaysia's Prime Minister is now Anwar Ibrahim, leader of Pakatan Harapan (PH), the coalition that had triumphed in the 2018 elections only to be scuttled by the factional changes of some key leaders. Now 75, he was a member of Malaysia's historically ruling party, the United Malays National Organisation (UMNO). In 1997, with the arrival of the worst financial crisis in Asia's history, he clashed with the party leadership over his reformist views, initiating a new generation of democracy activists with the Reformasi movement. Expelled from the party and imprisoned in 1998 for sodomy and corruption (charges common to many political imprisonments in Malaysia), he returned to the political scene in 2004, after the resignation of the historic UMNO premier Mahathir Mohamad. With his entry into the PH leadership, Anwar has the merit, observers claim, of having created Malaysia's first truly multi-ethnic coalition, capable of both gaining the support of the Malaysian Muslim majority and that of the country's main minorities (Sinhalese and Indians).

The election results

The 19 November elections had ended without a clear majority, although the balance of votes hung in favour of Pakatan Harapan (PH). At the count, the PH had gained 82 out of 222 seats in the lower house, compared to 73 for the Perikatan Nasional (PN) and 30 for the Barisan Nasional (BN). But to gain confidence, PH needed to win the support of at least 112 MPs, an attempt also made by the BN and PN. Five days before the vote, it was still unclear who would lead the country for the coming years. Right from the start, part of the Malaysian public was against BN and PN's obstructionism: 'It is absurd that the party that won the most seats is somehow defeated. Malaysians have voted, Anwar must become premier'.

The 2022 elections have shown how much the political scenario is changing: before 2018, government crises of this magnitude had never happened, nor had so much friction emerged between the key players in Malaysian politics. The results of the 15th general election, however, confirmed the slow decline of the ethnonationalist United Malays National Organisation (UMNO) faction. Once the party of the Malaysian government for almost sixty years, it has now moved to the other side of the political contest after its worst election defeat ever.

In the meeting scheduled before the meeting with the sultan on Tuesday, 22 November, former UMNO interim premier Ismail Sabri Yaakob (who took over the leadership of the government after the 2020 reshuffle) had then confirmed that he would remain in opposition. Later, UMNO itself said it was in favour of trust as long as the PN leader, Muhyiddin Yassin, was not elected premier.

Winners and losers

The real winner of these elections, observers claim, would be the PN coalition. Formed after the 2020 crisis, the group was able to take home a larger percentage of votes than expected with its strong Muslim and Malay identity connotations. Also winning the souls of its voters, analysts point out, was the search for a third way to the conflict between PH and BN.

This choice has not convinced everyone: there are those who accuse the PN of having thus favoured the rise of the Malaysian Islamic Party (44 seats), a party emblematic of that wing of Malaysian politics in favour of the total implementation of Sharia law. So much so that one citizen vented on Twitter: 'Now it's obvious. Malaysians are racists and religious fanatics. Welcome back to the past. Sayonara to our future."

Time for change?

No significant surge in the youth vote, as anticipated by some analysts. With the lowering of the right to vote to 18 years of age, the electorate took in 1.4 million new voters, and this may have affected the sinking of some historical leaders and UMNO itself. Among the big losers in these elections was the man who led the Malaysian government for almost two decades, the 97-year-old Mahatir Mohamad. His coalition, the Gerakan Tanah Air (GTA), failed to reach 20% of the vote, and the former premier lost the chance to win a seat in Langkawi, in the north of the country: the first time this has happened to him since 1969. The reaction of the markets was consistent with the uncertainty in the hours after the polls closed: on Monday the ringgit fell 0.8% against the dollar and stocks on the stock exchange demonstrated investors' low expectations of the stability of Malaysia's political class.

The impasse did not keep irony on the internet at bay. Memes circulated on social media with a job advertisement titled: 'Position open for the role of Malaysia's tenth prime minister'. Other users spoke of the embarrassment of feeling one's fate in the hands of the political class: 'It feels like we are all in divorce court, waiting for someone to decide who should take custody of us'. Social media were, however, also a cause for concern. Widely used platforms such as TikTok were alerted by the Malaysian authorities for fear that content inciting violence, or fake news, would depopulate.

For around six million people in Malaysia, the early elections on 19 November represent their first time at the ballot box. A constitutional reform in 2019 lowered the voting age from 21 to 18. But a younger electorate does not automatically translate into progressive opinions

Six million new voters and electors will be called to the polls in the upcoming general election in Malaysia on 19 November. Indeed, thanks to a constitutional reform in 2019, the Malaysian parliament lowered the voting age from 21 to 18, as well as included an automated registration system that further extends the electoral pool. Since Asian youth movements are often iconically associated with the fight against authoritarianism, there is a tendency to consider young people as 'natural liberals' and to assume that they will opt for more progressive policies than their older fellow citizens. But the preferences of the younger electorate in Malaysia are an unknown for everyone.

The next general election was supposed to be held in 2023. Instead, Prime Minister Ismail Sabri Yaakob, of the conservative United Malays National Organisation (UMNO) party, called early elections because he believes that the challenges of the Malaysian economy make the future of the coalition he heads, the Barisal Nasional (National Front), uncertain. The Russian-Ukrainian conflict, the slowdown of the Chinese economy, and the unresolved controversy over the 1MDB scandal are the perfect storm that is shaking the National Front's consensus again.

As the Guardian points out, no party in Malaysia has ever managed to govern alone. In the next general election, the main coalitions will be the Barisan Nasional, the Perikatan Nasional and Pakatan Harapan (Alliance of Hope), which ruled from 2018 until the political crisis of 2020. It was the Alliance, in a constitutional reform in 2019, that expanded the national electoral pool by lowering the voting age from 21 to 18. The amendment also included an automated registration system that also streamlines the Malaysian bureaucratic system for registering new voters. Thus, the national electorate increased from 14.9 million in 2018 to 21 million in the upcoming general election on 19 November. Social movements such as Undi18 fought for the passage of the law, reflecting the desire of Malaysia's young men and women to participate in the decision-making process of Asian parliamentary democracy. The Malaysian United Democratic Alliance (MUDA) would like to position itself as a catalyst for the demands of this demographic. People between the ages of 15 and 39 amount to about 45% of the population, but this is still an underrepresented sample in Malaysian politics. About 70% of the legislators are over 50 years old.

But which issues will stir the young electorate's spirits? Professor James Chin, director of the Asia Institute at the University of Tasmania, said that it is not certain that MUDA will be able to capture all the demands of the newly eligible voters. The leader of the movement, Syed Saddiq, said that the movement will focus on issues such as the cost of living, education, access to public transport and job opportunities. But in reality 'we don't know (...) how young people vote', Chin told The Diplomat, 'because there is no voting history'. It is not necessarily the case that the young electorate in Malaysia is oriented towards progressive policies, for a number of reasons. First, while ensuring greater democratic participation, the law to lower the voting age exacerbates the problems of 'malapportionment' in Malaysian constituencies. This mismatch dampens the impact of newcomers on political participation, as the majority of new voters between the ages of 18 and 20 are in urban areas. The electoral law, however, is centred on the majority principle of 'first past the post'. There is no proportional correspondence between seat allocation and population, so the high concentration of people living in urban constituencies - including young people - is underrepresented. Secondly, young people are not necessarily more oriented towards the multiracial and inclusive 'new politics' advocated by MUDA, because birth rates vary according to demographic composition. The new young voters mostly belong to Malay and indigenous groups, which often support the National Front's identity-nationalism inspired policies.

Malaysians are preparing to vote in what could be decisive elections to get the country back on track. But instability is just around the corner

Everything is set for the vote on 19 November, when over 21 million Malaysians will be able to choose their representatives. This will be the 15th general election in the history of the former British colony and perhaps one of the most turbulent in recent years. Certainly, analysts say, the one with the most difficult results to predict. Because in Malaysian politics everything seemed to be going smoothly, until 2018. The United Malays National Organisation (UMNO), the majority party, dominated the political scene with very few changes in leadership while the long-standing issues of inter-ethnic representation remained unresolved (only 50 per cent of citizens are Malays, with the remainder made up of Sinodescendants, Indians and other groups - some of which are considered indigenous). Then came the financial scandals (the most egregious was the one related to the state fund 1MDB) and government crises.

The new political landscape

After almost sixty years of stability, Malaysia has seen three governments change within four years, and two prime ministers in less than 20 months. The Pandora's box of Malaysian politics opened wide in 2020, when a number of leading politicians switched coalitions, causing the majority to collapse. The instability continued with new local elections called in the states of Malacca, Sarawak and Johor, while in October the fall of the government was announced and general elections were called. Thirty parties competed in this round, more than half of them merged into four of the existing coalitions. For the first time, the distribution of preferences could come out of the coalition that brings together some historic majority parties (Barisan Nasional, BN) against the opposition that had won the 2018 elections (Pakatan Harapan, PH).

The 2022 elections will be significant for the new political environment that is forming in the country. The crisis has exposed the limitations of the Malaysian electoral system, ranging from the weight of its 222 constituencies to gender parity. Constituencies, for example, have changed over time for various reasons, such as favouring the ethnic majority or maintaining the status quo. The changes that occurred at the dawn of the 2018 elections then redefined the boundaries in the name of 'representation on a local basis' and redistributing the number of registered voters into numerically similar groups. Where gerrymandering - the practice of redrawing the distribution of seats to gain political advantage - does not arrive, accusations of electoral fraud remain: it happens that people with the same personal data are registered on different lists, or names of deceased and non-citizens appear.

Mindful of what has happened over the past five years, MPs passed a law against 'party-hopping', which came into force on 5 October. The legislation prohibits politicians from changing parties once they have been elected by the citizens - an attempt to prevent a repeat of a government crisis premeditated by factions intent on dismantling the majority.

The voting factors

In this context, there is a momentous innovation: the lowering of the voting age from 21 to 18. With this manoeuvre, which took effect at the end of 2021, some 6.2 million new voters were added. With this manoeuvre the under-40s became the most important voting bloc, the one that will determine the course of the elections. An element that has not gone unnoticed by the parties, who have tried to introduce younger figures and have made big promises on the issues of work and economic stability. All this amidst attempts at communication straddling traditional rallies and the use of social platforms (especially Facebook and TikTok).

Nevertheless, 'there is a lot of uncertainty,' William Case, professor of history and international relations at Nottingham University in Kuala Lumpur, told The Guardian. 'This massive influx of young people will increase the size of the electorate but will not significantly change the results'. The low expectations of younger people seem consistent with what is perceived as a more general disillusionment of Malaysian citizens with politics. "[...] In the absence of good and sustainable policies for all the problems we collectively face, it will be my generation that will face the consequences of inaction and identity politics. However, I am not sure that these issues are priorities for the people I am supposed to vote for,' comments 20-year-old Rifqi Faisal.

Justifying this narrative is the idea that UMNO's impregnable position at the top of the government has always made elections a de facto empty exercise of the right to vote. Nevertheless, since the thirteenth general election (conventionally General Elections 13, GE13), turnout has increased significantly, reaching 82.32% in 2018. But the low election turnout in Johor (54%), for example, is dampening expectations.

No less important - to the extent that they have often polarised and monopolised public opinion - are ethnic and religious issues. A survey of Sinodescendants shows a strong focus on the candidates, with 9 out of 10 advocating voting for the coalition closest to the ideal of a multi-ethnic Malaysia.

The issues

The mismatch between politics and citizenship is not just a perception of young voters. Even politicians this year have to deal with a plethora of issues to prioritise. For several years, the theme of corruption seemed to permeate the political discourse, with the different parties ready to accuse each other of real or alleged involvement in the financial scandals that have emerged in recent years (such as the aforementioned 1MDB one). But even this narrative seems to be faltering, as reported by the news site SAYS citing Malaysia's progress in the Corruption Perception Index: the fact that the latest scandals have emerged, and the alleged culprits identified and sanctioned, would have reduced the presence of this issue in public opinion.

Most analysts seem to converge on a macro-issue common to countries in the region at this time: the economy. The rising cost of living, real estate prices, and the strengthening of welfare are just some of the problems that are emerging in post-pandemic Malaysia. Young Malaysians also have to contend with a labour market that is less and less aligned to their skills and where wages are no longer sustainable. 

However, the economic data for 2022, as Bloomberg points out, appear almost contradictory: Malaysia's GDP growth was among the strongest in the region (+14.2% in Q3). Unemployment rates also seem to have returned to pre-pandemic levels, but with interesting differences between ethnic groups (there are more unemployed among Malaysians, 4.2%, than among Sinhalese, 2.7%) and states (in Sabah, in the north, the unemployment rate is 8.2%, while in neighbouring Sarawak it is 3%). Inflation has doubled since the beginning of 2022, while during the summer there was a record spike in fuel and food prices. One of the many factors driving this trend was a drop in the ringgit exchange rate, which favoured exports but raised import costs. Still to be seen are the results of the outgoing government's latest manoeuvre, which in June was to allocate at least USD 17 billion to an aid plan for citizens and businesses - a record figure in the country's history.

The climate factor

The resignation of the government in October raised a number of controversies, first and foremost the climate issue. Deciding to hold elections in the autumn in Malaysia means dealing with the monsoon season, a phenomenon that is becoming less and less controllable due to climate change. Many rallies have been cancelled due to heavy rain and gusts of wind, while there are fears of a drop in voter turnout caused by flooding. To deal with the problem, a network of civil society associations, Undibanjir (from undi, vote, and banjir, floods) has been set up with the aim of organising rescue teams and facilitating the relocation of voters to their constituencies.

On the climate issue, young Malaysians also seem more attentive than past generations. Ninety-two per cent of them say climate change is a crisis that concerns them closely, according to the results of the National Youth Climate Change Survey by UNICEF and UNDP. Climate change has also entered the political debate in this election, and could draw a percentage of the vote towards the names that are more outspoken in favour of the environmental cause, as an in-depth report by Malaymail points out.