OpinionAsia.com has published my piece on the recent elections and Malaysia’s younger generation:
The recently concluded Malaysian general elections were historic in so many ways. This was after all only the second time in Malaysia’s history that the ruling Barisan Nasional (BN) coalition lost its two-thirds majority in Parliament, and thus no longer able to amend the Constitution with impunity.
The government lost an unprecedented five states to the Pakatan Rakyat (PR), a loose coalition of opposition political parties. PR’s success was partly due to the effective leadership and relentless campaigning of former Deputy Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim. Anwar had made a name for himself as a student leader in the 1970s when he fought for the plight of oppressed farmers against the government. In 1982, Anwar joined the United Malays National Organisation (UMNO), the leading party within the BN and rose to the top within a decade. But when Anwar’s relationship with then Prime Minister Dr Mahathir Mohamad soured, the latter sacked him amidst trumped up charges. The incident caused a student movement, “Reformasi“, who marched the streets demanding for reform and Mahathir’s resignation.
This time around however the youth chose a silent revolution. Tellingly, a substantial number of young candidates fielded by the PR – including myself – emerged victorious. But the young voters in general tended to vote for the PR. This was apparent when our campaigning strategy of using mobile and the latest internet-based technologies –mobile phones, blogs and social networking websites such as Facebook and MySpace as well as online videos on Youtube –caught on like wildfire among Malaysians.
More crucially, these new technologies undermined the old politics of divide and rule. For many years, the BN relied on the stratified media to craft different messages to Malaysia’s diverse constituency, allowing them to stoke the fires of communal discontent on the ground to galvanise their support…
Read the full piece here.
