MALAYSIA: Election campaign gets underway
Updated
Campaigning for Malaysia's March 8 general election started on the weekend, with UMNO leader Prime Minister Abdullah Badawi vowing to seize a two-thirds majority. The polls are likely to be dominated by ethnic tensions and anger over rising prices.
Presenter: Sonja Heydeman
Speakers: Toni Kasim, Malaysian Human Rights activist
HEYDEMAN: PAS, whose law-and-order policy calls for Islamic punishments such as stoning and amputation, late last week released the names of 13 women, including several doctors, in its list of candidates for the March 8 poll.
The party's chief strategist says the party's ideal of an Islamic state should not be threatening to non-Muslims, who make up more than 40 per cent of the population.
PAS is strong in Malaysia's Muslim heartland, in the northeast of the peninsula, but has failed to extend its power base to the rest of the country.
Malaysian human rights activist Toni Kasum says she has serious reservations about the move to field more female candidates.
KASUM: If it was a genuine step from within the party and everyone was thinking, no this is a good thing for the country, they would have done it years ago, because women's contribution to the country has been significant for many decades now. And if you look at 1999, even up to 1999 they hadn't fielded women in that year. I remember because I ran that year and it was really quite sad, it was quite devastating to see that they hadn't bothered to field even one woman. And in 2004 they fielded a few women but with the proviso that they had to get permission from their husbands first.
HEYDEMAN: At the last election in 2004, PAS suffered heavy losses as Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi, a moderate Muslim, led the ruling multi-racial coalition to a landslide re-election.
Khoo Kay Penh, a political analyst based in Malaysia, says there is a great sense of nervousness in parts of the country.
PENH: One is Islamisation force and the other one is multi-racial, civil and secular forces. Secular meaning that I mean it is not devoid of religion but simply meaning that there's a respect for civil law. So I think you can find that tension within the community.
HEYDEMAN: Khoo Kay Penh says the problem with PAS in the last 2 general elections was its attempt for national power.
He says as yet, it just doesn't have mass appeal.
PENH: I'm not saying that in the future it won't happen. I think a lot of people also ran from the performance of UMNO. I think it may come to a point at the day because UMNO is also trying to Islamise the country, and you can see that, that a lot of Islamisation processes are actually initiated by UMNO. So up to a point people might say that, well we're going to have an Islamic nation anyway, and if UMNO continues this way and refuses to actually curb corruption and to curb abuses of power etcetera, people might say let me choose a better behaved and perhaps maybe even a more conservative Islamic party, I think that can happen.
HEYDEMAN: PAS's goal is to turn Malaysia into an Islamic state, but this campaign is also calling for Malaysia to become a "welfare state".
In an election manifesto released on Thursday, PAS called for state oil company Petronas to be put under parliament's direct control, and for lower petrol prices, free education and a national health fund.
However human rights activist Toni Kasum says it's possible the ruling party will be returned but with a reduced majority.
KASUM: The events of last year have really reduced the confidence in the ruling coalition. A lot of people are really, I mean to put it mildly pissed off but how that translates into votes is another thing because I think people are still voting out of fear, the fear that somehow if they do not vote the ruling coalition in, they're going to be denied certain facilities, or they're going to be denied certain funding and stuff like that, or somehow they're going to be found out that they've voted for the opposition. So there's still some of that culture, fear, the fear of what if we vote out this corrupt authoritarian state and inadvertently bring in a possible theocratic state. So their faith in PAS and PKR is not exactly that high.
