ABSTRACT
In early March 2008, a ‘political tsunami’ swept throughout Malaysia.1 The twelfth General Elections churned out polling results that jolted both sides of the political divide, confounded all predictions, and are now touted as historic and epochal in transforming the manner in which political contestation along racialized lines in Malaysia is currently constituted. The promise of a ‘new politics’ originally heralded by the large-scale street protests in Kuala Lumpur (Reformasi movement) in the late 1990s when Mahathir Mohamad unceremoniously deposed his deputy premier Anwar Ibrahim has now come to fruition. Barisan Nasional lost its political stranglehold of two-thirds parliamentary majority held for nearly four decades, which had become for many, especially since the long Mahathir era, a normality. More starkly, excluding the East Malaysian states of Sabah and Sarawak which have different political genealogies, the figures in Peninsular Malaysia show a drastic dilution of its supposed multi-ethnic appeal – only 85 out of 165 parliamentary seats (51.5 per cent) went to Barisan Nasional.2 Equally groundbreaking, several veteran and senior-ranking leaders of the ethnic-based partner political parties of Barisan Nasional (notably from the Malaysian Indian Congress [MIC] and Chinese-led Gerakan) lost their seats to opposition neophytes and unknown newcomers. Perhaps most significant of all, the majority of voters in five out of thirteen states including the important Federal Territory of Kuala Lumpur gave the mandate to rule to the opposition coalition. In sum, the poll results birthed an uncharted political landscape for Malaysian citizens to countenance and navigate through in the years ahead.
