But now, through their complicit partnership, the old adversaries are changing the political landscape, with a new Malay government duopoly taking shape, says Clive Kessler, Emeritus Professor of Sociology and Anthropology at the University of New South Wales, Australia.
“The Umno-PAS consortium sees PAS not just reborn and strengthened but, in a very serious policy and political sense, in control,” he says in an article in East Asia Forum (EAF), published out of the Australian National University.
The EAF is a joint initiative of two academic research networks: the East Asian Bureau of Economic Research and the South Asian Bureau of Economic Research.
Kessler says: “Malay demographic predominance continues to increase due to high Malay birth rates, immigration of Indonesian and others who become ‘Malays’ in political terms, and the emigration of many middle-class non-Malays discouraged by growing Malay power and Islamist domination of Malaysian life.
“Malay domination is also entrenched by gross electoral ‘malapportionment’ – non-Malay voters tend to be corralled within very large urban electorates, while Malays in the rural heartlands generally vote in much smaller constituencies.”
In the article, part of an EAF special feature series on 2017 in review and the year ahead, Kessler, who is intimate with Malaysian politics, traces the relationship between Umno and PAS over the years.
He notes that, although for a brief span in the 1970s they worked together, for decades they have been implacable adversaries and bitter rivals for Malay votes. PAS has, in the past, mobilised Malay votes against Umno and worked to undermine Umno’s credibility and authority
PAS, he says, has been happy to wage a long-term struggle using its political leverage over Umno to “incrementally make Umno its hostage and ensure it would forever find itself pressured to adopt PAS-congenial and Islam-promoting policies. This underlying dynamic has produced the increasing and, over recent years, radical de-secularisation of Malay society and Malaysian politics”.
In the elections of 2008 and 2013, Umno alienated the Barisan Nasional’s old non-Malay supporters with increasingly strident assertions of Malay supremacy and found itself facing a ‘popular front’ opposition comprising PAS, DAP, and PKR.
“Since 2008, Umno’s central political aim has been to break that popular front alliance by stigmatising the Democratic Action Party as anti-Malay and anti-Islam, by denouncing the People’s Justice Party (PKR) as a party led by a moral reprobate and by berating PAS for its refusal to be a ‘proper’ Islamic party and its betrayal of Islam.
“In the aftermath of the thirteenth election, that goal was accomplished. PAS broke from the opposition, purged its leadership of coalitionists and entered into an increasingly comfortable entente with Umno.”
Kessler says Umno has struck a deal with PAS whereby Umno will get PAS’s Malay support and, in return, the Umno-led government will run “PAS-congenial shariah-minded policies”.
He adds: “Umno knows the score – it can rule for ever, so long as PAS wants it to and lets it do so. Umno is driven by fear of the electoral power PAS can wield against Umno. PAS knows that too. That is the basis of how both sides now work – sometimes together, sometimes not, but always in concert. This situation is congenial to PAS and very acceptable to Umno.”