How can you explain what has happened in Malaysia? How can you explain the sheer jubilant wonder of seeing Mahathir Mohamad come back to save the country from the slippery slope he had painstakingly constructed – someone who built so much of modern Malaysia, but also turned the very concept of electoral reform into anathema?

It’d be like the spectre of Ronald Reagan returning to take on Trump, according to one meme doing the rounds, though Nigel Farage popping up to run a latter-day Remain campaign may be closer in spirit. But analogies sputter into irrelevance here – the plot twists in Malaysian politics are closer to those in professional wrestling than anything else in real life.



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It’s surreal. It’s been surreal since that endless night of 9 May, as the country waited and watched into the wee hours, long past the time every previous election had been reduced to incumbents and despair. Mahathir claimed victory, but this is Malaysia, where gerrymandering appears with the same sledgehammer subtlety as the disappearance of US$3.5bn worth of development money in the 1MDB scandal. Surely this couldn’t be happening. Surely anything could happen. And it did.

After yet another delay, Mahathir was finally sworn in as prime minister late on 10 May. There he was, 92 years old, smaller in body yet colossal in stature, acid tongue rendered playful by victory: a particular highlight was an aside to the press pack that they “may ask questions, but in a very orderly fashion. Please remember I was the dictator”. Then there was his vanquished opponent, Najib Razak, issuing apologies with a compelling mix of dignity and utter revisionism. But most surprising of all has been the grace of concession from a government long addicted to dirty tricks, and the peace that has followed in its wake.

There is a reason for this. Mahathir is a known quantity; these are uncharted waters being navigated by the same captain. He’s also a man, and Malay, and Muslim, a palatable alternative for the rural voters who kept the Barisan Nasional coalition in power for so many decades. Malaysia was ready for a change of government, but other changes will take time.

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There is much corruption to uncover. There are the affirmative action policies put in place after deadly race riots in 1969 that have long disenfranchised the country’s Chinese and Indian minorities. There is a call for women to account for a relatively modest 30% of the new cabinet. There are the LGBTQI rights set back so far after the trumped-up sodomy charges that saw Anwar Ibrahim, Mahathir’s deputy turned nemesis turned ally, jailed twice. There is the Malaysian press, for which government interference metastasised into censorship. And there is the Malaysian people, who now must work for each other with the same verve that saw them united against a common enemy.

But, as the past three days have shown, anything is now possible. Wan Azizah, a savvy politician who is married to Anwar, is the country’s first female deputy prime minister. Mahathir has promised to cede power to Anwar, for whom a full pardon has been secured from the king. Across the country, election materials are being lovingly kept as souvenirs. They are mementoes for the citizens who broke their backs for decades to get to this point, who spent time and money and effort to vote and act as polling agents, and reminders of the opposition politicians who put egos and partisanship aside to run as an alliance.

Malaysia has had its first democratic transition of power since its independence in 1957. That’s the lasting beauty of Pakatan Harapan, the new governing coalition; it quite literally means hope, a suddenly abundant commodity in a country for so long starved of it.