ON a trip to Manila the past week, I jokingly asked an ex-cabinet official from the Fidel Ramos administration if his former president might be thinking of “doing a Mahathir” given that both Ramos and Prime Minister Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad are contemporaries (the former having just turned 90). They had famously hit it off when both were last in power in the 1990’s.
The official let on that Ramos would have hopped on a plane to Kuala Lumpur had his doctors allowed him to.
Much of the world — and most certainly in our own region — is still trying to figure out what the change in government in Malaysia means (as are most Malaysians, of course).
A Manila television journalist friend set me thinking when he said, in reaction to an earlier piece I wrote about the change, that: “As well the free press (in the Philippines) is resisting and challenging the populist promises (Philippine President Rodrigo) Duterte made during the election” and that, therefore, “our governments have much in common.”
This sort of ties in with the way the Financial Times (FT) described Dr Mahathir’s electoral upset as something in the league of the election triumph of Donald Trump in the United States and the “Brexit” vote in the United Kingdom, all “black-swan” events that no one foresaw coming.
But, Dr Mahathir in the same political mould as Trump or Duterte?
In response to the Filipino journalist, I made the distinction between economic and political populism. An economic promise such as the one to abolish the Goods and Services Tax is evidently a populist sop, but one which Dr Mahathir made it clear was a major Pakatan Harapan election plank he personally disagreed with.
The prime minister apparently was able and willing to make all the necessary political compromises if these served his main political objective which was, of course, to replace what he considers an administration mired in serious corruption. Winning the election was, therefore, an end in and of itself. Corruption will naturally not end with one fell swoop that victory in the 14th General Election delivered. So, maybe, the win is also the means towards the end of a less corrupt political culture?
Trump and Duterte clearly also made what some consider to be fanciful electoral promises. In Trump’s case, an “America First” stance that prioritises American interests foremost. In Duterte’s, a deadly “war” on drugs that has unleashed something of a killing field on Philippine streets.
If Dr Mahathir were to be painted as a populist today, a case can perhaps be better made that he is one of the original populists. He is something of an iconoclast making identity politics palatable long before Trump or some European nationalist politicians today take up almost identical political refrains.
As he told FT in an interview this week, there is less racism at the top level of government but, “at the ground level, the racial feeling is still very strong”.
And, in his economic nationalism, Dr Mahathir’s international kindred spirits today can probably be found among China’s current leaders. Chinese President Xi Jinping loves nothing better than promoting national economic champions in the same manner that Dr Mahathir used to promote such national champions as car-maker Proton. But, the prime minister is nothing if not a paradoxical mass of contradictions in that he identified earlier with the late British prime minister Margaret Thatcher in their common belief in unleashing market forces on once hide-bound public enterprises through their respective privatisation programmes.
Leaders naturally evolve over time and those like Dr Mahathir who have the rare luxury of 15 years between “retirement” and re-assuming office presumably have greater opportunities to reflect and perhaps reconsider matters.
But, if there is one thing about Dr Mahathir, it is surely how remarkably consistent his basic core beliefs and world view have remained. It may even be fairer to suggest that rather than him evolving in his beliefs, it is much of the world and most of us that have evolved and come around full circle to the way Dr Mahathir sees the country and the larger world.
Corruption, it must be noted, is a global affliction and a civilisational struggle for the millennia. There are no fool-proof checks against it occurring, and even democracies struggle to be rid of it, especially if it has taken deep roots.
As Malaysians congratulate themselves on becoming a “normal” democracy, far truer perhaps is celebrating a nation that is realistic and “populist” from the start.
John Teo views developments in the nation, the region and the wider world from his vantage point in Kuching, Sarawak