voters called to the polls for early legislative elections

About 21 million voters and 222 seats at stake. The Malaysians are summoned, Saturday, November 19, for early legislative elections of more than ten months. The first offices opened at 8 a.m. local time (1 hour in Paris) in this Southeast Asian country.

For four years, the parliamentary monarchy of the country has been shaken by political turbulence and a waltz of governments which has led to three prime ministers succeeding each other in four years.

After more than sixty years in power, the historically dominant party – the Malayan Unified National Organization (Umno) – was heavily sanctioned at the polls and ousted from power in 2018, marking the first alternation in the country’s history. The then Prime Minister Najib Razak, implicated in the embezzlement of several billion dollars from the sovereign wealth fund 1MDB, is currently serving a twelve-year prison sentence.

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Slim majority

Umno only returned to business with a narrow majority in 2021, taking advantage of the struggles between the two governments that had succeeded it. And it was in the hope of strengthening his grip on power that Prime Minister Ismail Sabri Yaakob dissolved parliament and called snap elections, originally scheduled for September 2023. Not without coming under pressure from a faction of his party that hopes to come out on top in Saturday’s election.

But even if Umno benefits from the well-oiled mechanics of the historically dominant party, its image suffers from its association with a vast corruption scandal. The 1MDB fund scandal, which involves large-scale embezzlement of the sovereign wealth fund which was supposed to contribute to the country’s development, triggered investigations in the United States, Switzerland and Singapore, where financial institutions were allegedly used to launder money. billions of dollars.

Some observers fear that if the party returns to power, Umno will work to obtain the release of Najib Razak and to prevent corruption prosecutions against several other party members, including its president Ahmad Zahid Hamidi.

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“In practice, voters will decide whether Najib Razak and the president of Umno should be punished for the charges against them”says Bridget Welsh of the University of Nottingham in Malaysia.

The threat of the monsoons

If so, Malaysians may choose to give their ballots to opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim, a veteran of the Pakatan Harapan alliance, whose last chance to lead a government could be. He has been imprisoned twice for sodomy, a crime in Muslim-majority Malaysia, but he has always maintained his innocence, referring to his imprisonment as political persecution.

Voters may also prefer 97-year-old reformist Mahathir Mohamad, a former Umno member who has created his own party. This former prime minister ruled the country with an iron fist from 1981 to 2003, before becoming “the oldest prime minister in office” according to the Guinness Book of World Records, when he was elected in 2018 to a second 22-month term.

But voters are called to the polls in the middle of the monsoon season. “The Prime Minister puts the lives of voters in danger”criticized Mahfuz Omar, an opposition MP, by organizing the elections at this time and, with climate change, “I really fear heavier rains all over Malaysia”he told Agence France-Presse.

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The parliamentarian fears that voters cannot “not vote if their houses are flooded and the roads become impassable”. Heavy rains have already started to affect some areas. Malaysia was hit in 2021 by the worst floods in its history. The toll rose to fifty dead and thousands displaced.

The World with AFP

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