Youth are protesting high costs of living, unaffordable fuel prices and the continuing reign of the Barisan Nasional party in Malaysia. Credit: Udey Ismail/CC-BY-2.0

By Baradan Kuppusamy
KUALA LUMPUR, Jun 6 2013 (IPS)

They had voted for “ubah” or change. What the youth of Malaysia got instead seems to be more of the same.

“I am deeply disappointed,” said Alex Lee, a 24-year-old student at the Kuala Lumpur campus of Universiti Tunku Abdul Rahman (UTAR), a private institution run by the Malaysian Chinese Association, one of the main parties in the current ruling coalition.

“All my friends, relatives and everyone I know said we could vote and change the government - but even though all of us voted for Pakatan Rakyat, we could not." -- Samantha Yow
“We thought people’s power would bring about change. Instead we see the same old government taking office and the same old policies are in place,” Lee told IPS during his shift at a warong (eatery) in the upscale Bangsar suburb of Kuala Lumpur, where he works part time.

Lee is giving voice to the widespread resentment among Malaysia’s urban youth, who, comprising 60 percent of the country’s 13.5 million voters, had thought their numbers would be large enough to bring about the change they so desperately sought at the recent elections.

They had pinned their hopes on the Pakatan Rakyat, a coalition of three disparate parties, as the vehicle of that change. As it happened, though, Barisan Nasional (BN), a coalition of 13 parties that has held the reins for 56 long years, returned to power yet again.

BN went on to form the government on the basis of securing 133 seats in the 222-seat parliament, its poorest showing to date. Despite bagging 52 percent of the larger national vote, PR had no choice but to occupy the opposition benches, given the country’s first-past-the-post electoral system.

In the May 5 election Barisan Nasional won 133 rural seats but lost the popular vote.

Alleging a “theft” of this election, PR leader Anwar Ibrahim has been staging rallies across the country, which dejected youth are attending in droves, numbering well over 50,000 at any given time.

“I had rushed to register as a first-time voter along with my friends in college, and we all supported the Pakatan,” said Lee, who just last week was in the nearby town of Petaling Jaya to attend one such rally that drew an estimated 70,000 people, most them of youth.

“We thought we would have a new beginning. But it’s the same old problems again: high university fees, high cost of living.”

While Malaysia enjoys full employment and provides employment to many foreign workers, opportunities consist mostly of low-paid factory jobs.

Transport, rent and other living expenses account for most of the average monthly salary of roughly 970 dollars. Young people have little to look forward to after they leave school besides working hard just to make ends meet.

Thus, Pakatan Rakyat’s campaign of free education, improved public transport, reduced fuel prices and cheaper cars struck a chord among urban youth.

“This country is for a few rich people,” Margaret Lam, who works with Lee at the warong, told IPS, referring to corrupt practices like granting government cronies Approved Permits to import luxury cars at reduced tax rates, while placing heavy duties on imported vehicles under the guise of “protecting” the local car manufacturer, Proton: the first indigenous-owned and operated automobile enterprise in the country that has long enjoyed government support.

In fact, the Pakatan Rakyat had announced plans to revamp the National Automotive Policy (NAP) if it came to power, by slashing duties on what many people here see as cheaper, better quality cars from abroad. The reforms would have forced Proton to get competitive, rather than rely on the government’s protectionist policies that have buoyed it up for three decades at a huge cost to ordinary people, experts say.

This promise by PR was yet another reason for youth to throw their lot in with the opposition, since many young people were already fed up with the government’s preferential treatment of natives (called bumiputras, or ‘sons of the soil’).

Alan Rajasooriya, who spoke with IPS at a recent rally in Seremban, a city about 60 km south of the capital, said he wants more than anything to see an end to policies that discriminate against descendants of Indians and Chinese.

“There should not be any preferential treatment to natives over non-natives,” he said, lashing out at policies that favour bumiputras by giving them priority in major business deals and government contracts.

According to him, this view finds echo among thousands of other youths who have been taking to the streets. They are also demanding an end to corruption and cronyism.

Rajasooriya and scores of others like him also firmly believe Ibrahim’s accusation that the country’s election commission allowed Bangladeshis, who come to the country as guest workers, to vote, in order to beef up the government’s numbers.

This is something that the election commission denies. However, as a gesture of reconciliation, the new government, under the prime ministership of Najib Razak, has offered to place the body under a parliamentary select committee.

Neither Ibrahim nor the youth are appeased. “All my friends, relatives and everyone I know said we can vote and change the government,” Samantha Yow, another youth protester, told IPS. “But even though all of us voted for Pakatan Rakyat, we could not.”

Now she feels she has no choice but to attend rallies, where she and other frustrated youth “share their aspirations and let off steam.”

The wave of popular discontent has also highlighted the rural-urban divide, with protesters articulating the desires of primarily urban youth.

Ibrahim Suffian, director of programmes at the Selangor-based Merdeka Centre for Opinion Research, attributes this partly to the level of government-controlled media in the Malaysian countryside, where about 30 percent of the population resides and where most people rely on national newspapers and television stations for their information.

Internet penetration of the country is just over 60 percent, and most rural youths have been left out of the digital revolution, unlike in urban areas where social media is a mainstay both for information and entertainment.

While rural voters, mostly farm labourers, along with small rubber and oil palm holders, remained staunchly loyal to Barisan Nasional, young urbanites were forming their own opinions about politics and governance and questioning their own role in the country’s future.

Sadly, this change did not happen fast enough for the PR, as the urban vote bank failed to match the landslide of ballots cast in the rural hinterland.

Experts say youth will most likely play a big part in the major opposition rally planned for June 15 in the capital, but whether or not their protests will amount to change remains to be seen.

It has been over a fortnight since Malaysia held its 13th general election that saw the Barisan Nasional (BN) coalition returning to power and continuing its 56-year rule. However, instead of joyous celebration, there are widespread protests on the street.

Prime Minister Najib Tun Razak may have won another electoral battle on May 5, but he is fast losing the war.

Opposition candidate Anwar Ibrahim is seeking to harness the discontent in post-election Malaysia. Credit: Udeyismail/CC BY 2.0

The wave of demonstrations is led by Anwar Ibrahim, leader of the opposition Pakatan Rakyat (PR) alliance, who disputes the election results and claims wholesale fraud. “If not for the electoral fraud on May 5, we would be in Putrajaya today,” he said, referring to the federal administrative centre, 25 km south of capital Kuala Lumpur.

He alleges that “planeloads of Bangladeshis” voted illegally, accounting for the reported record turnout at the elections in this Southeast Asian constitutional monarchy.

Vowing to reclaim the democracy that he says has been denied to the people, Ibrahim has been holding rallies around the country. People are turning up in the tens of thousands at these rallies, a testament to how deep popular disenchantment with the election runs. It is too early to say if this will lead to an Arab Spring in Malaysia, but there is no denying the overwhelming desire for change.

The first such rally, dubbed ‘Black 505’, kicked off in the west peninsular state of Selangor. Held at night at the Kelana Jaya stadium outside Kuala Lumpur, it attracted a crowd of nearly 120,000, comprised mostly of urban youth gathered through social media networks.

It has been followed by several others, the latest being on Friday May 17 at Seremban, capital of the neighbouring state of Negeri Sembilan.

The atmosphere at these rallies is almost festive. The dress code is the black of mourning, broken often by colourful umbrellas as people gather despite the rain. Cries of ‘reformasi’ or reform rend the air, reinforced by the honking of vuvuzelas.

“My family and I had hoped and prayed that all the young people had come out and voted to topple this oppressive government, but instead we were cheated of our victory,” Angelina Tan told IPS at the rally in Seremban, 60 km from Kuala Lumpur.

The 34-year old graphic designer was at the venue with her three-year-old son. “I am here for my son, it is his future we are fighting for,” she said, visibly angry at what she called a “sham democracy”.

Prime Minister Razak and the Election Commission have denied any fraud. The BN, a coalition of 13 parties, won 133 of the 222 seats in the bicameral Malaysian parliament.

The PR emerged the winner in the popular vote, cornering 52 per cent of the total, but ended up the loser given the country’s first-past-the-post system of voting. A legacy of British colonial rule, it ensures that the party with the largest number of seats forms the government.

Hopes had been riding high this election. The BN’s grip over the country seemed to have come loose in the last election in 2008, when it won just 140 seats. For the first time since the 1969 elections, the coalition had failed to win a two-thirds majority – a weapon with which the BN had long been running roughshod over people, according to government critics.

The opposition parties – the secular Democratic Action Party (DAP), the Islamic PAS party and the nominally secular Parti Keadilan Rakyat (PKR), led by Ibrahim’s wife Wan Azizah Ismail – had won 82 seats in 2008.

It was an achievement they were hoping to consolidate this election, for which the three dissimilar parties had come together under the umbrella of the Pakatan Rakyat, which loosely means “people’s alliance”.

However, the opposition managed to increase its tally only by seven more seats, as the BN retained much of the rural vote. It became the deciding factor since the rural-urban weightage in seat distribution is skewed in favour of the former: there are three to four rural seats to each urban seat. And given the BN machinery in rural Malaysia – money, patronage and affirmative action policies – rural voters stayed with the party unlike many of their urban counterparts.

The BN thus won the mostly rural eastern states of Sabah and Sarawak. Together these two states account for 56 seats in parliament, of which the BN won 45. It also did well in the big peninsular states of Johor, Pahang and Kedah and bagged a smattering of seats in other smaller states. It also managed to recapture, with slim majorities, the two states of Perak and Kedah, which had gone to the opposition in 2008.

The marginalised, disillusioned, angry urban voter, however, stayed with the PR. While some of this urban vote went to DAP, a mostly Chinese-based political party with multi-racial representation, urban Malays disenchanted with the BN’s long rule delivered their votes to the PR.

Yet it did not prove enough for the BN to be voted out, something urban Malaysians tired of rising crime, drug culture and corruption were desperately hoping for. Many people are convinced that the May 5 poll was hijacked and there was widespread fraud.

It is this continuing urban discontent that Ibrahim, a former deputy prime minister and finance minister, is hoping to tap into.

“I would have reduced fuel prices, ordered free education and abolished road tolls,” he told the rally at Seremban. These were the promises the PR coalition had made in its election manifesto.

“We will not suffer under the escalating cost of living,” he thundered, to lusty cheers from the crowd.

PAS leader Rosli Yaakob, who was also present at the Seremban rally, told IPS that voters firmly believed that were it not for fraud, the PR would have won the elections. The PAS itself has done poorly compared to the other PR member parties.

He also wanted the Election Commission disbanded because he believes they were party to the alleged electoral fraud. (One prominent charge against the Election Commission is that the indelible blue ink it provided to ensure that no one voted twice was found to rub off quite easily.)

“We also want a royal commission of inquiry, as there was blatant abuse in some of the areas,” Yaakob said, referring to the allegations of vote-buying and use of government machinery for campaigning.

However, despite people’s misgivings, there is thin evidence of outright cheating or ballot box stuffing so far. Dr Jeyakumar Deveraj, MP for the Sungai Siput constituency in Perak state and the only socialist in parliament, conceded as much.

“We were not able to find conclusive evidence of significant cheating during the political process,” he told IPS.

But the “sheer volume of complaints” from the public goes to show how little trust they have in the Election Commission, he added.

He sees hope in the churn that has come in the wake of the election results. “There is a much higher level of citizen activism to preserve the sanctity of the polling process,” he said. It is good for democracy, he added.

And Ibrahim is wasting no time in harnessing this resentment.