🇲🇾 Are the wheels coming off for Anwar Ibrahim?

Hello friends!

After the last few weeks in Singapore, it’s fairly quiet today. Luckily, Malaysia is keeping us busy.

In the last 48 hours, I’ve had an enormous influx of new free subscribers, which is always exciting. The country-specific newsletters are usually within the paywall but to celebrate someone (who!) very nicely putting my name out there I’m going to keep this week open and hope that some new readers join us:

I offer free subscriptions for all Asean and Timorese nationals under 30, so if that’s you just let me know via reply and I can activate that. Substack also has a very easy institutional membership tier that a couple of workplaces have taken advantage of. This makes it much easier for finance departments to reimburse and for me to not cry when I see how many people with fancy email addresses forward it regularly. 

Also want to flag this, we don’t chat about the Philippines until Thursday but here’s some rare good news: Maria Ressa and Rappler have been acquitted in the final tax evasion case!

Let’s crack in and I’ll see you tomorrow for the Mekong,

Erin Cook

Former prime minister Najib Abdul Razak and 1MDB’s old CEO Arul Kanda Kandasamy will stay acquitted of abuse of power charges in the enormous scandal after prosecutors forgot to file an appeal. Malaysiakini reports Court of Appeal judge Hadhariah Syed Ismail said prosecutors had until July 6 and were then granted an extension, but missed the deadline. “So today we make an order for the two notices of appeals to be struck out,” he said. 

This will surely do nothing for the emerging belief in some quarters that the country is trying to forget about its corruption woes in favour of political stability. We touched on the case of Deputy Prime Minister Zahid Hamidi and his dismissal without acquittal last week and, as expected, much more has happened since.  

Syed Saddiq Syed Abdul Rahman, the lone MP of the youth-oriented party MUDA, removed himself from the government benches. He won’t be joining the opposition coalition Perikatan Nasional but will instead act as a ‘third force’ in parliament. He’s always been mightily ambitious but a singular voice in a messy and combative environment is a big gambit. 

Fair enough, says PKR’s Hassan Abdul Karim. “I wish all the best to Syed Saddiq and Muda. It is a positive development for Muda to function as a third force in the country's political arena to provide healthy competition to the Pakatan Harapan-BN coalition and the opposition. A third force comprising Muda and PSM [Socialist Party], for instance, is a healthy development in national politics, which would give the rakyat [the people] more choices,” he said, as reported by Malaysiakini.

The PKR youth wing isn’t as forgiving. The organisation’s information chief Haziq Azfar Ishak wants Syed Saddiq to give up his seat in Muar: “His victory in Muar was not on his personal capacity or Muda as a third force, but because Muda was in an electoral pact with Harapan. His failure to vacate the seat would be an act of stealing the Muar Parliament seat by becoming a third force as well as a betrayal of the people’s mandate, which chose Muda due to the electoral pact with Harapan,” he said in a statement, also per Malaysiakini. 

Syed Saddiq, for his part, is not for turning: “If I need to vacate the seat just because of fighting corruption, I suggest those MPs or the ministers who said as such to get a mirror. They need to vacate their seats too. Since when they were elected to ignore corruption? Are you ready to vacate the seats too?” he told Sinar Daily, via Malay Mail. 

“What is the platform we are fighting for? Before the GE [General Election] we promised to not ignore corruption, we said we would fight corruption and bring reforms. But what was promised before the GE is way too different now.”

The young MP has promised to continue to vote with the government so it isn’t a great issue for Anwar Ibrahim, but it has added to the prime minister’s growing pile of problems. Anisah Shukry and Kok Leong Chan have dug deep into Anwar’s challenges here for Bloomberg. Wong Chin Huat, a professor and political scientist at Sunway University, told the pair that the government has lost any sort of judicial credibility after the Zahid Hamidi affair and will now need to “really deliver on the economy,” a tough ask! 

Anwar is highly aware of how this all looks. He has ‘pledged to separate the role of AG and public prosecutor to prevent any abuse of power,’ Bloomberg reports. “But we can’t bulldoze this in a few weeks and we need to have a two-thirds majority to enforce this reform,” the Prime Minister said Friday. 

If today’s showing from Syed Saddiq is any indicator, he won’t be letting up. Parliament is sitting today — his first day as the ‘third force’ — and he laid straight in on his old friends: “In 2015, in this very chamber, 70 MPs who were in the opposition bloc (at the time) sought to debate judicial decisions in court. Prior to that, it was the 1MDB court case (and the) attacks on the attorney-general. They could raise everything and anything. Now that they are in government, they are being hypocrites,” he told the chamber, as per FMT. 

None of this has assuaged fears that Najib Razak could be freed and strolling down Jalan Alor sometime soon. “The verdict in Zahid’s case has undermined the confidence of the people and civil society in the government’s efforts to combat corruption,” the Kuala Lumpur and Selangor Chinese Assembly Hall, a group that largely supports the Anwar government, said in a statement as per SCMP.

“Since he has the prerogative to advise the Pardons Board, if Najib gets a pardon, Anwar will continue to lose whatever credibility he still has,” political analyst Mohar Tunku Mokhtar from the International Islamic University also told the SCMP. 

“All that anti-corruption and good government baloney was for the gullible people out there who still believe in reformasi,” former diplomat Dennis Ignatius said in a post and quoted by Time. It’s a cynical but succinct version of much of the analysis. What was all that fighting to end corruption for? 

In the same piece, Ariel Tan, the Malaysia program head at Singapore’s S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, notes that for many young voters, credibility was lost well before the Zahid case: “By working with UMNO, Pakatan had lost the moral high ground on corruption, and it had not been able to connect with the younger voters either via its leadership or messaging.”

Meanwhile, Lawyers for Liberty have accused police of ‘intimidation’ over a planned Perikatan National rally against the Zahid Hamidi case. Police have vowed to take action against organisers if the proper permits are not obtained for the event. “This is plain and calculated harassment and intimidation, as there has been no indication whatsoever that the rally will not be peaceful. Similar utterances have been made by Pakatan Harapan politicians,” LFL executive director Zaid Malek said in a statement obtained by Malaysiakini today.