美国国家公共电台 NPR In Election Upset, Malaysia's Mahathir Returns To Power After 15 Years

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RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:

As far as political upsets go, this one was huge. In Malaysia, the party that has ruled that country for the past 60 years is out along with its controversial prime minister, Najib Razak. The party was beaten by an opposition¹ coalition² led by the 92-year-old former prime minister, the man credited with Malaysia's rapid modernization³ in the 1980s. Michael Sullivan reports from Bangkok.

MICHAEL SULLIVAN, BYLINE⁴: Prime Minister Najib Razak did all he could to stack the deck this election - gerrymandering voting districts, promising⁵ political pork and even passing a fake-news law to stifle⁶ dissenting⁷ voices just before the election. It didn't work.

BRIDGET WELSH: I think Malaysia has moved in a very brave direction. It's repudiated⁸ the government that's been in power for 61 years in a rout⁹. And I think it's entering a new period of its political history with a lot of enthusiasm and a lot of hope.

SULLIVAN: Bridget Welsh is an associate professor at John Cabot University in Rome and has written several books about Malaysia. Reached via Skype in the Malaysian capital, Kuala Lumpur, she says much of the electorate¹⁰ was simply unhappy with the high cost of living, unpopular tax hikes and embarrassed by the so-called 1MDB scandal. Billions of dollars siphoned off from a government investment fund linked to Prime Minister Najib and his family, a scandal now being investigated by the U.S. Justice Department.

And then there was the 92-year-old former prime minister Mahathir Mohamad, an unlikely champion of democracy given his authoritarian¹¹ track record but a man people knew and, says Bridget Welsh...

WELSH: Mahathir compared favorably to Najib. And the implication was that he was a pull factor. He was a game-changer. And these two things, the push from Najib and the pull from Mahathir, led to quite significant changes - 20 percent swings in many areas in electoral politics, where these are huge numbers.

SULLIVAN: Umapagan Ampikaipakan is a Malaysian radio host and commentator¹² who says a lot of people are still trying to get their heads around the fact that the party that ruled for 61 years is out.

UMAPAGAN AMPIKAIPAKAN: People don't know what to make of it. There is a sense of elation¹³ because there is the sense of change, which has never, ever happened. I don't think anyone was expecting it because it's very similar to kind of a Brexit-Trump situation in that almost every opinion poll, almost every survey done, almost every op-ed written had Najib Razak returning to power - maybe with a slimmer majority. So this was quite a shock to most people.

SULLIVAN: And a welcome change for democracy advocates in a region that's been tilting¹⁴ toward authoritarianism¹⁵, not democracy, in recent years in Cambodia, in Thailand and in the Philippines.

For NPR News, I'm Michael Sullivan in Bangkok.

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