Commentary | Abdillah Noh, From Electoral Victory to Political Change: Malaysia’s Unfinished Transition
It has not been all smooth going for Malaysian politics since the Coalition of Hope, the Pakatan Harapan (PH), achieved its famous victory in 2018. While that victory lasted only 22 months, weighed down by a multitude of issues[1], the PH coalition now has another chance at delivering change after returning to power in 2022, though this time as part of a grand coalition – the Unity Government – with Barisan Nasional (BN), the very party it ousted in 2018. It is an unusual arrangement that has baffled even seasoned political observers. Yet, despite the unlikely partnership, the last four years has been one of political calm – until now.
Four years into the partnership, cracks are beginning to appear. The country’s three recent state elections in which PH suffered substantial losses, together with the latest news of Najib Razak’s royal pardon are now testing the resilience of the Unity government. Problems in the PH-BN partnership began to appear during the state elections. In the elections the BN – the PH partner at the federal government – decided to go alone. The BN reasoned that the Unity government was formed at the King’s urging amid a hung parliament and was never meant to be permanent. The state elections turned out to be a divisive one. The sectarian divide was fuelled by a range of near mutually exclusive grievances on many issues. While both the PH and BN leaders gave a stoic front that the Unity government remains intact at the Federal level, it is hard to dismiss the murmurs of frustration. That frustration gained traction last week following news of Najib Razak’s royal pardon. To PH supporters, the news adds to the narrative of stalled reform.
The obvious question is: will the Unity government hold? On the surface and despite the political din, the Anwar government remains resolute to complete the five-year term which ends in Dec 2027. But realistically, between now and December 2027, calls for an early election could gather momentum and much needs to be done by Anwar Ibrahim to keep the coalition intact.
The PH won the 2022 election on the promise of reform and it is obvious that one ready solution for the Anwar administration to renew confidence is to deliver on and speed up, the institutional reform that the coalition promised during election. If institutional reform is the quick answer why is delivering institutional reform difficult in the last four years?
To start, addressing reform is problematic because political parties and their vote banks have different ideas of what reform should look like. While institutional reform has often been used as a rallying cry, its meaning remains ambiguous. It is obvious that in the last four years, the Unity government has labored with what meaningful institutional reforms should look like. This is made harder given the near exclusive demands of different voting blocs. At its core, Malaysian politics remains primarily shaped by identity politics – ethnic politics to be precise. Political parties often respond to mutually exclusive demands of the vote base for political legitimacy. Resolving issues is difficult because so often, issues of law, equity, equality are viewed exclusively through an ethnic lens. PH’s inability to address issues that suit a voting bloc is viewed as backtracking on reform promises.
There are of course, low hanging fruits, when it comes to reform – measures that cut across ethnically exclusive interests. But the PH has yet to deliver on these either. The issue of political financing has been in the works for many years, since 2009 to be exact. While the PH pledge during election campaigns to act on political financing, the issue remains on the back burner. Another promise was to reform appointment of Attorney General and judges; such appointments remain with the executive despite election pledge that they would require parliamentary oversight. There was also the promise that the Prime Minister should not hold two portfolios which is yet to be addressed.
Another reason why change agents – like PH – struggle to carry out reforms and consolidate change is that many opposition parties are built around charismatic leaders steeped in anti-regime sentiment. Political parties, especially newly minted ones, often lack durable organizational structures. They are formed around strong personalities rather than broad programs and coherent ideologies. As such, these parties are vulnerable to struggles over issues of leadership succession and suffer from disagreements over access to resources or party’s direction. The collapse of the PH 1.0 coalition collapsed in 2020, following leadership struggle between then Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad and Anwar Ibrahim is a case in point.[2] Anwar’s Unity government is currently facing somewhat similar challenges. Anwar’s PKR, for example, has seen several party stalwarts leave the party. Two of its senior leaders subsequently established a new party following disputes over key party positions. The latest was Nurul Izzah, Anwar’s daughter and the party’s deputy president, who announced that she was taking leave from party position. Within the PH coalition, the DAP has held up well. The party has long- standing institutional structure, ideological coherence, strong internal rules and continued legitimacy among its voter bases. Still, the party is now undergoing serious introspection amid disquiet over its direction and leadership priorities after it lost crucial seats in the three state elections. With reform promises slow in coming, party supporters have called for a review of the party’s position in government and its direction. This concern was put to the test recently at a party congress, where nine out of ten delegates voted to remain in government. It is an important result, despite only half of the party delegates turning out at the congress. The DAP holds the most seats within the PH coalition, and a negative result would put the Unity government on shaky ground.
Institutional legacies along with the broader logic of path dependence, increasing returns and the nature of change, offer another explanation for the difficulty of consolidating change. My own research suggests that change agents often struggle to deliver promised change because they themselves are embedded in existing institutional logic – logic shaped by the state’s institutional terms of reference. Governments – like the PH – do not inherit a blank slate; they inherit institutional arrangements, and changing these institutions is messy, costly and difficult, particularly when actors benefit or enjoy increasing returns from established arrangements. New governments, like the PH 2.0, inherit a multitude of institutional legacies – the country’s political terms of reference, bureaucratic practices, state-society power structure, patronage and elite networks and constitutional constraints. Taken together, these can significantly limit reform efforts. Anwar Ibrahim’s remark that political appointments are justified because they are rewards for party service supports the claim that even change agents are invested in existing institutional arrangement.[3]
Can Malaysia deliver its unfinished political change? This remains a challenge. To be fair, the PH government’s current struggle at delivering reform is not unlike the experiences of Japan, Greece and Italy, to name a few. In 2009, Japan’s opposition alliance, riding on the promise of institutional reform, the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ) swept into victory after displacing the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), the party that enjoyed more than fifty years of uninterrupted rule. The DPJ lasted only for one term with one analyst claiming that “...Japan’s new political system has become characterized by party change without concomitant policy change.”[4] Greece’s Syriza Party offers another example. The party won in style in 2015 after promising to upend the country’s oligarchic rule, reform the economy and address the country’s austerity measures. The party struggled to deliver on reform promises after assuming power, with the party leader Alexis Tsipras criticised for courting the very Greek establishment he once wanted to challenge. Italy’s Five-Star Movement, an anti-establishment party, is another case of a party that promised to eradicate corruption and deliver much needed reform. The party eventually drifted towards the right and succumbed to internal friction before collapsing.
Consolidating change remains a challenge for Malaysia because ideas about institutional change remain epistemically scattered and incoherent. Still, there are reasons to be optimistic. Malaysia has thrived – politically, economically, and socially – on power sharing arrangements for all its post-independence years, and this remains true given its political economy trajectory. As the second most competitive economy in Southeast Asia, Malaysia remains open and competitive. Its political system continues to be largely run along stable, programmatic party politics. The Malaysian bureaucracy has also proven to be resilient despite a string of leadership changes, even amid the Covid-19 pandemic. More importantly, democracy has been Malaysia’s biggest gains the last few years, no matter how messy it currently is. With voters increasingly willing to switch loyalties, political parties now know that they can no longer take voters’ support or their electoral promises for granted. Najib Razak’s royal pardon is yet another test to the country’s institutional resilience. Change will come, but the caveat is that it will not be at the pace that many are comfortable with.
Notes
[1] Noh, A., & Yashaiya, N. H. (2023). When institutions ‘bite’: Malaysia’s flawed democratisation. Contemporary Politics, 29(4), 492–513. https://doi.org/10.1080/13569775.2023.2185176.
[2] Ibid.
[3] The Edge (2025) Political appointments as rewards for loyalty set dangerous precedent, think tanks warn. https://theedgemalaysia.com/node/756849.
[4] Lipscy, P. Y., & Scheiner, E. (2012). Japan Under the DPJ: The Paradox of Political Change Without Policy Change. Journal of East Asian studies, 12(3), 311-322. doi:10.1017/S1598240800008043.
Abdillah Noh is an Associate Professor with the School of Politics, International Relations and Economics, University of Nottingham, Malaysia. He is the author of Political Change and Institutional Resilience: Lessons from Southeast Asia.
To cite this essay, please use the bibliographic entry suggested below:
Abdillah Noh, “From Electoral Victory to Political Change: Malaysia’s Unfinished Transition,” criticalasianstudies.org Commentary Board, October 12, 2026; https://doi.org/10.52698/LLKR5793.