6 - Money, Malfeasance, and a Malaysian Election

Summary

INTRODUCTION

Voting based on personal economic progress or standing is common anywhere. However, the considerations that enter into such calculations vary, complicating assessment. In Malaysia, complex phenomena glossed as “money politics” are especially germane to the extent and nature of “economic voting”: the links between business and political parties, the partisan use of “slush funds” from oil and other resource wealth, and the preponderance of patronage appeals in elections.

However, their electoral implications are obdurately opaque, especially at the hazy intersection of illicit and beneficent behaviour. That murkiness makes it difficult to predict, too, how the recent change of government will affect patterns of money politics, though some predictions are plausible. On the most obvious level, up until now, we have been able to track the proximity of elections through increasingly bloated government budgets full of enticements for key constituencies. This has taken the form of public resources’ being used to make the incumbent Barisan Nasional (BN, or National Front) popular and beloved, but in a manner that is sufficiently public and wealth-sharing to be legal and basically acceptable.

There is no reason to expect the new Pakatan Harapan (PH) government to shirk such politically useful budgeting—and its state-level budgets have followed similar templates. However, some of the more problematic dimensions of money politics are likely to diminish, now that the BN lacks access to resources and PH so significantly differentiates itself in terms of being “clean” and accountable. In other words, given similarities in welfare programmes and commitment to racially defined preferential policies, the question in 2018 was less of who had better policies than who could be trusted, given concerns with financial probity and seemingly out-oftouch ruling-party elites.

But troubling dimensions of money politics, developed over decades of BN governance, have broad reach. They extend not only to the confluence of massive corruption scandals such as that revolving around the 1Malaysia Development Berhad (1MDB) sovereign wealth fund, but also to the ways in which government programmes are turned to partisan advantage, as (or appearing to be) conditional patronage. Indeed, the explanation used to justify the transfer of large payments to former Prime Minister Najib Razak's accounts in connection with the 1MDB scandal is that those funds were for elections.