Policy Regimes and the Reconstitution of Oligarchy

Conventional wisdom among analysts of Malaysian politics holds that colonialism departed Malaya bequeathing British political institutions including a constitutional monarchy, elected Parliament, independent judiciary, professional civil service, and professional uniformed forces. To that should be added another feature, namely an oligarchic structure of power.Footnote ² The oligarchic character of the post-colonial polity was superficially reflected in three ways. First, there was the tendency of the first Prime Minister, Tunku Abdul Rahman, to treat politics as a matter of chummy elite compromise that maintained a framework theorised as consociational. The compromise was popularised as the ‘Alliance formula’, by which ethnic elite figures claiming different degrees of credibility to represent their communities exercised joint rule over a multi-ethnic society. In an otherwise standard reading of the ethnic politics of the 1960s, Case (1991: 461) noted that some opposition leaders “denounced the oligarchical assumptions on which Alliance power-sharing was based”. Another sign of oligarchic rule was the ability of the political system at critical moments to pass the office of the Prime Minister to his deputy, invariably an insider within the oligarchy or the latter's ethnic Malay subset.Footnote ³ The first three prime ministers were bangsawan (aristocrats), while the commoner fourth “went on to become bangsawan”.Footnote ⁴

The elite compromise, smooth successions in leadership, and exalted lineage of top leaders were the political requirements of oligarchic rule. However, they did not long remain the distinguishing features of a socially unchanging oligarchy. Wealth was an emblem of an oligarchy that came to “command and control a massive concentration of material resources that can be deployed to defend or enhance their personal wealth and exclusive social position” (Winters Reference Winters2011: 6). The transformation was in the rise of “a capitalist oligarchy that fused public authority and private interest” (Robison and Hadiz Reference Robison and Vedi R.2004: 43) as embodied by powerful figures who headed their own family or public corporations. The most vital change was a process of oligarchic reconstitution that incorporated a new, distinctly Malay subset of oligarchy. The positions of the “new Malay oligarchs” were embedded in powerful politico-business coalitions formed along a state-party-class axis. In practice, the new Malay oligarchic subset embodied the regime's administrative and bureaucratic authority, the UMNO's political power, and the interests and aspirations of Malay capital. In comparison, prominent non-Malay oligarchs owed their positions to the persisting influence of old wealth and/or their more recent relationships with senior leaders of the regime or UMNO. For non-Malay oligarchs, strong connections with BN's non-Malay parties, which were subordinate to UMNO, were not irrelevant, but not of overriding concern. Over time, the political economy of Malay oligarchic reconstitution overlapped with the social engineering of the New Economic Policy (NEP) that set out to incubate a Bumiputera Commercial and Industrial Community (BCIC).

The rise of Malay oligarchy followed four routes, chronologically beginning with its genesis in the immediate post-independence years. Each route can be distinguished by the social origins of its would-be oligarchs, prevailing phase in capitalist development, and the principal policy regime.

The first route to oligarchic status, established by the time of independence, was used from 1957 to 1969 under the liberal policy regime of the Alliance. Then, some Malay notables had royal, titled, or elite civil or uniformed service connections and/or strong political positions. However, they shared one disadvantage. They did not possess enough wealth or capital to be economically independent. Out of political tact or at the government's prompting, some large private companies appointed Malay notables to their boards of directors and/or retained them as partners. These Malay directors or partners helped connect foreign or domiciled non-Malay (especially Chinese) economic interests to Malay political power, and facilitated the former's dealings with officialdom including securing concessions from the state (Searle Reference Searle1999: 82). This privileged group of “Malay ministers and mandarins” (White Reference White2004: 393) or “figurehead capitalists” (Searle Reference Searle1999: 82–84) received fees and perquisites that augmented their incomes and assets without them truly engaging in business. White (Reference White2004: 417) noted, “Some years before the formal advent of the NEP, Chinese (and European) capitalists were required to share business opportunities with leading Malay bureaucrats and politicians. Political savvy thus emerged as an additional key entrepreneurial skill, which frequently assisted business success in the post-colonial state”. There was a reverse angle to these business-politics relations: “The reward for the financial support of the Chinese business politicians [for UMNO and the Malay leaders] proved to be a set of plumb posts in the cabinet” (White Reference White2004: 393). The budding nexus between high politics and big business, which White marked as the beginning of “crony capitalism”, signified a reconstitution of the oligarchy in which the Malay subset added material wealth to political power. This first haphazard route to oligarchy was not radically transformative, because the policy regime left intact old patterns of foreign control, sizeable Chinese ownership, and Malay absence from modern sectors in the pre-NEP economy (Puthucheary Reference Puthucheary1960).

After 1969, the NEP imposed a policy regime of active state economic intervention. Statist capitalists (Jomo Reference Sundaram1988) emerged who controlled state resources and thrived on their deployment. The NEP state did not invent rents or rent-seeking activity; these had been present since colonial times. However, as the state seized the commanding heights of the economy, its agencies used regulation, investment, and sponsorship (Jesudason Reference Jesudason1989) to generate diverse forms of rents. The rents used to nurture the BCIC included “licenses, contracts, concessions, preferential lending (at low interest rates) and share allotments (at below market prices), and guaranteed high-return investments” (Tan Reference Tan and Weiss2015: 201). However, to establish state-owned enterprises (SOEs) and acquire shares in public companies “to facilitate Malay ownership and provide managerial training”, the state deployed rents in the forms of “state protection from competition, the socialization of risks, easy access to finance and unconditional subsidies” (Tan Reference Tan and Weiss2015: 201). The NEP regime deepened its interventionism, expanding its fleets of SOEs from the federal to the state level and extending their writ from rural to urban areas and from economic to social sectors. Thus, rent creation and rent-seeking activities opened a pathway for “the ascendance of statist capitalists” (Jomo Reference Sundaram1988: Chapter 10), the second route by which Malays could ascend to oligarchic status. A branch of this route was accessible to Malay capitalists, who started and remained in the private sector, or Malay administrators and professionals, who left the civil service for private business. The state supported capital accumulation by Malays, joint ventures of Malay and non-Malay partners, the appointment of Malays to company directorships, and procurement of government contracts by politically connected businessmen (Jomo Reference Sundaram1988: 266). The first decade of the NEP was marked by rapid growth, enhanced state revenues, high state expenditure, systematic rural development projects, accelerating urbanisation, and extensive investment in physical and social infrastructure. These were very favourable circumstances for aspiring Malay capitalists to parlay many forms of state assistance such as land grants, credit facilities, direct and indirect subsidies, share allocations, awards of contracts, and commissions into personal and corporate wealth. Successful Malay capitalists gained more than individual upward mobility from a fusion of economic pursuits with social objectives, bureaucratic authority with public resources, and personal aspirations with national targets. Unlike the sporadic pre-NEP attainment of oligarchic status, the second route of Malay oligarchic ascendance was radically transformative, because it commenced the reconstitution of the oligarchy.

A third route to oligarchy was introduced by Mahathir's nationalist-capitalist project of economic transformation, which sought to replicate the success of the East Asian late industrialisers.Footnote ⁵ Two major policies associated with this nationalist-capitalist project were Mahathir's ‘Malaysia Inc.’ and ‘privatisation’. They seemed like a contradictory pair, with Malaysia Inc. maintaining a statist hand on economic management and privatisation marking a neoliberal turn to the market. With Malaysia Inc., Mahathir recast the interventionist NEP state as a variant of the East Asian developmental state. To that end, he constructed a strong state-capital alliance. Except where the state launched a program of heavy industrialisation, Mahathir tried to shift part of the burden of spearheading economic development from the SOEs to the private sector. If this initiative was to ‘roll back the frontiers of the state’ selectively, it was complemented by the transfer of public assets to private ownership. Here, by dismantling the original NEP system of holding public assets ‘in trust’ for the Malays, the Mahathirist policies created a new route for oligarchic reconstitution. New Malay capitalists competed to profit from the transfer to private ownership of public monopolies, some SOEs, new concessions to build and operate large infrastructural projects, and other forms of state assets. Those who competed most successfully possessed ample capital or could obtain sufficient credit and ‘strong cables’, the local jargon for powerful political connections. The strongest ‘cables’ connected to the apex of the UMNO leadership that headed Mahathir's regime of centralised, personalised power (Hwang Reference Hwang2003). In their heyday, Malaysia Inc. and privatization shaped a peculiar terrain for a ‘New Malay’ oligarchic subset embedded in a state-party-class axis.Footnote ⁶ In practice, the axis wielded the regime's bureaucratic authority, UMNO's political power, and the material interests of Malay capital. This unparalleled concentration of political influence and class privilege led to brazen oligarchic conduct, the most aggrandising of which was shown by UMNO's corporate empire (Gomez Reference Gomez1990). During Mahathir's 22-year term as prime minister, that empire – composed of the Fleet, Hatibudi, and Renong groupsFootnote ⁷ – was controlled by Daim Zainuddin. He was assisted by NEP-bred “Malay rentier-business cadre” (Tan Reference Tan and Weiss2015: 208), some of who were popularly called the “Peremba graduates”Footnote ⁸ (Searle Reference Searle1999: 245). It was said of Daim, whom Mahathir first appointed as Minister of Finance in July 1984, that “he brought to government a view that no longer saw the spheres of state, party and private interests as distinct entities, whether in the expansion of UMNO's corporate interests or in the promotion of Bumiputra capitalists” (Searle Reference Searle1999: 245). Fittingly, no one better personified the state-party-class axis than Daim. He was concurrently the Minister of Finance, UMNO treasurer, and leading Malay capitalist for many years.

A fourth route expanded the third by turning towards greater financialisation in the economy. This route was tested in the early years of the Mahathirist regime; however, progress was obstructed by the 1985 recession and financial scandals of the mid to late-1980s. The post-1990 resumption of rapid economic growth and expansive privatisation metaphorically transformed this route into the ‘Gold Rush’ highway of the Mahathirist era. Vast fortunes were quickly made through the public listing of companies and Initial Public Offers, corporate mergers and acquisitions, and intense speculation in equities. The frenetic expansion of the Kuala Lumpur Stock Exchange was abetted by the entry of foreign portfolio investment funds. More than old-styled bank loans were required to finance rapidly emerging corporate ventures. Merchant banks managed large syndicated loans that tapped external borrowings.Footnote ⁹ Large corporations took a cue from Mahathir's Look East Policy to emulate the Japanese sōgō shōsha (general trading house) model, diversifying into sectors beyond their core businesses (Khoo Reference Teik2003: 43). In addition, massive rents were “typically used for unproductive wealth accumulation (such as share-for-assets swaps, reverse takeovers, and mergers and acquisition), creating a politically linked ‘new rich’ with access to substantive funds, some of which [were] channelled back as political funds to government” (Tan Reference Tan and Weiss2015: 204). Some funding came through external loans and foreign investment that “provided the Malay elite with low cost participation in ventures exploiting domestic markets” (Hughes Reference Hughes1999/2000: 53). The combination of politically decided exercises in privatisation and a policy preference for financial liberalisation spurred “conglomerate-style business expansion, facilitated by the capture of financial sector rents through the banking system and government promotion of the stock market” (Tan Reference Tan and Weiss2015: 204). The “politicized oligopolies” (Gomez and Jomo Reference Gomez and Jomo K.1997: 180) that emerged from this financial and business milieu developed into new centres of oligarchic wealth and power.

How much personal aspiration, class ambition, social engineering, and political push went into the project of reconstituting the oligarchy by creating a new Malay subset within it was evident in the diversity of the vastly expanded Malay capitalist ranks. Based on their origins and operations, one typology of Malay businessmen comprised three categories: those who represented their clients in seeking rents through patronage, those who used their UMNO positions to secure state contracts or concessions, and those who ventured into business from the bureaucracy or politics (Tan Reference Tan and Weiss2015: 207). Among these, some had such strong ‘cables’ that they formed personalised policy networks that could “bypass formal bureaucratic channels, enabling politicians to take over control of state-held assets from technocrats and bureaucrats” (Tan Reference Tan and Weiss2015: 208). One rigorous study completed in the early 1990s listed many kinds of Malay capitalists: figurehead capitalists, executive-professional directors, executive-trustee directors, owner directors, functional capitalists, bureaucrats turned businessmen, state managers turned owners, politicians turned businessmen, political capitalists, rentiers, transitional entrepreneurs, private capitalists, UMNO's proxy capitalists turned businessmen, and UMNO's proxy capitalists turned corporate captains (Searle Reference Searle1999; italics added). These business types and categories were a dazzling constellation of entrepreneurial hopefuls. They were fellow travellers on the four routes of oligarchic reconstitution, now switching from one route to the next, now evolving from one category to another. The notable elements of a “complex amalgam of state, party and private capital” (Searle Reference Searle1999), they circulated through the corridors of power and privilege. They belonged to “a flourishing capitalist class and associated strata of political and economic fixers and cronies [that] had pervaded and captured the system of state capitalism”.Footnote ¹⁰

The Old and New in Transformation

The totality of the Malay business activities conducted along the state-party-class axis brought about three kinds of socio-political transformation. The most visible was the “transformation of the Malay bourgeoisie from primarily directors – not owners – of large corporations (before the mid-1970s) to Malay millionaires” (Tan Reference Tan and Weiss2015: 207). The deeper was the parallel entry of Malay businessmen including professional and trustee Malay executive directors into the political elite. Indeed, the social profile of the leadership of the UMNO was altered as businessmen and professionals displaced or overshadowed once influential administrators, schoolteachers, and local notables. Furthermore, UMNO increasingly selected its leaders at different levels of the party structure: candidates for election to Parliament or the State Legislative Assembly or appointment to the Senate or local council, and its ‘proxies’ for party-owned corporations, subsidiaries, and assets from among its businessmen members. Alternatively, successful Malay businessmen not directly involved in UMNO's elite circles served as the contributors to party coffers and/or financiers of electoral campaigns. At the corporate level, prominent members of the oligarchy owned or headed large private corporations including those owned by UMNO, and managed an array of government-linked corporations (GLCs); statutory authorities; and provident, pension, and other trust funds. The oligarchy dominated the national economy outside a privileged and therefore untouchable multinational corporation-dominated enclave of export-oriented industrialisation (EOI).Footnote ¹¹ However, they did not desire and thus disregarded the Chinese-majority small and medium enterprise sector. Against this reality the political economy, Searle's “amalgam of state, party, and private capital” and Tan's typology of Malay businesses bore ample sociological evidence that the end products of the processes of transformation were not merely Malay capitalists, but a capitalist oligarchy. The third, insidious transformation was the mutation of UMNO's historical raison d’être of Malay nationalism to a mission of Malay capitalism. This ideological mutation grew via the shifts in elite ethos, ethnic rationalisation, and class worldview that accompanied the full trajectory of oligarchic reconstitution.

At first glance, the reconstituted oligarchy with its sizeable and powerful Malay subset, should have substantially resolved a pressing problem of early Malayan independence, namely the “necessarily fragile and untenable” political situation in which “a governing group dominated the state without an economic base of its own” (Jomo Reference Sundaram1988: 247). At least, post-NEP oligarchic reconstitution rendered the Malaysian capitalist class “less narrowly identified with a problematic pariah entrepreneurial minority”Footnote ¹² (Sidel Reference Sidel2008: 138–139). Perhaps the nationalist-capitalist project forged a “national bourgeoisie” in the late Mahathir era, removing “the millstone of Malay backwardness” (Mahathir Reference Mohamad1991) from the neck of the nation. The idea did not seem inconceivable. For example, based on his detailed study of the burgeoning ranks of Malay capitalism, Searle postulated that “a core of productive investment and entrepreneurial activity [was] emerging within the cocoon of state/UMNO-supported patronage networks and rent-seeking activity” (Searle Reference Searle1999). If so, and it seemed plausible in the mid-1990s, then the “riddle of Malay capitalism”—not Malaysian capitalism as in Searle's formulation—was whether sufficiently numerous “real Malay capitalists” had emerged who would foreswear their “unorthodox origins” (Searle Reference Searle1999: 1) in state nurture and rent-seeking. Had an autonomous “real Malay capitalist vanguard” truly come into its own, its success would have vindicated the strategy, driven by UMNO and implemented by the state, of lavishing unquantifiable material resources on Malay capital. This reasoning was indirectly advanced by Mahathir when he chastised ‘Malay businesses’ and ‘the Malays’ for their lack of effort and continued expectations of ‘entitlements’, subsidies, and handouts.

However, the Malay oligarchy's eventual form might have been grotesque to those who had originally thought of ‘eradicating poverty irrespective of race’ and ‘abolishing the identification of occupational function with race’ in terms of well-planned and scrupulously executed social reform. Post-NEP oligarchic reconstitution was moulded by state intervention, policy reorientation, capitalist transformation, and political conflict. However, this admixture generated its own contradictions and stresses. State intervention in one form – providing projects, contracts, and concessions – had the unplanned result of encouraging dependence from large and small firms. State intervention in a second form – regulating, licensing, and monitoring businesses – was so geared towards ‘Malay empowerment’ and ‘non-Malay restriction’ that no regime of stringent oversight was put in place to discipline Malay capital. From the early NEP period to late Mahathirist era, policy reorientations picked privileged winners and created aggrieved losers. In principle, all politico-business coalitions of the state-party-class axis claimed a common fidelity to the NEP's restructuring goal, but rivalry was rife and it was riskily linked to UMNO's factionalism. In general, the oligarchy had always had a multi-ethnic core, but its reconstitution was ideologically driven by an ethnic rationale. Thus, its politically dominant Malay subset was predisposed to using ethnic aggrandisement to advance its particularistic and class interests. The barriers to joining an oligarchic subset, which was far from congealed, were not yet forbiddingly high. In contrast, the porosity of oligarchic boundaries tempted many interlopers to press for entry via state, party, and class channels. At the same time, where aspiring oligarchs had not had the time, inclination, competence, or foresight to consolidate their businesses, fortunes swiftly leaked away in bad times which had been acquired through much wheeling and dealing and little learning-by-doing in good times.

Based on Searle's evidence, only a small proportion of his varied capitalist brood had hatched to flaunt the ‘real capitalist’ credentials – alien to habitual rent-seekers – of independence, dynamism, competitiveness, and resilience. Jeff Tan's analysis of the costly failures of major privatisation initiatives (Tan Reference Tan2008) showed that the process of oligarchic reconstitution was accompanied by insatiable rent-seeking, squandered subsidisation, unaccountable losses, non-committal oversight, and an untreated addiction to ‘moral hazard’. In the 1980s, the BMF scandal and crises in the non-bank financial sector emerged. Other flaws and failures were known and exposed in the Auditor-General's annual reports, for example. However, they were not corrected or regarded as the symptoms of a spreading malaise of political economy. In the midst of plenty, criticisms of economic mismanagement were dismissed as misinformed – since leakage via loss-making SOEs was written off as the cost of learning or running social enterprises – or as malicious, that is, ‘anti-NEP’, ‘anti-Malay’, and ‘anti-government’. Seen differently, a trajectory of reconstitution had culminated in a “complex and fluid politico-business oligarchy”Footnote ¹³ that traded the old administocrats’ political problem of lacking an economic base for the new oligarchy's economic problem of living excessively off its political base. The only discordant note issued by the political leadership, which became relevant later, was Anwar Ibrahim's expression of intolerance of corruption when he was Acting Prime Minister for two months in 1997.

Convulsions of the Oligarchic Order

Prospects of the termination of Mahathir's political career loomed at three moments: in 1970, after he lost his parliamentary seat in the 1969 general election and was expelled from UMNO for openly attacking the Prime Minister; 1987, when he narrowly beat Tengku Razaleigh Hamzah's challenge to his leadership of UMNO; and 1997–1998, when the East Asian financial crisis caused many people to blame Mahathir for exacerbating market volatility and hope for his replacement by Anwar Ibrahim.

Whatever else they meant to Malaysian politics, these three moments connected Mahathir to Malay oligarchic reconstitution. His political rehabilitation, return to UMNO in 1972, and appointment to the Cabinet directly involved him in the NEP's creation of the BCIC. His 22-year tenure as prime minister consolidated his patronage of the ‘New Malay’ oligarchy. However, by 1987, the hardships created by economic recession, privatisation, austerity measures, and suspension of the NEP caused a loose constellation of SOE interests, civil service, and small Malay capital – the ‘losers’ of the Mahathir-Daim policies of Malaysia Inc. and privatisation – to back a Razaleigh-led ‘Team B’ to challenge Mahathir's ‘Team A’, in which the New Malay oligarchic ‘winners’ were deeply entrenched (Khoo Reference Jin, Kahn and Kok Wah1992). As such, Mahathir's victory over Razaleigh in the 1987 UMNO election was a triumph for UMNO's oligarchic faction over the ‘losers’. However, the dividing lines were sharp, the battle bitter, Mahathir's victory slim, and UMNO split. The Razaleigh camp continued to fight outside the party in the courts and 1990 general election. In short, economic distress and tough policy measures disrupted the process of oligarchic reconstitution, and destabilised UMNO and the political system. Only after UMNO and BN won the 1990 election against a Razaleigh-led coalition of opposition parties, was Mahathir and his regime able to reassert their dominance of the political system. With the return of economic prosperity in the early 1990s, oligarchic consolidation resumed along the fourth route of reconstitution to reach its zenith, before the 1997 financial crisis brought it down.

In Malaysia, the regional currency meltdown and drop in share values threatened to overwhelm the oligarchy, which had hollowed asset values, non-performing loans, insolvencies, and forced divestments. In the oligarchy, the ‘UMNOputra’ segment was the most vulnerable to imminent collapse, whose proclivity for speculation and corporate expansion ahead of tested managerial experience belied its dependence on state sponsorship. With corporate fortunes ebbing and prospects for obtaining easy projects fading, no less endangered were the oligarchy's hangers-on, the numerous small Malay contractors and sub-contractors who customarily sheltered under an UMNO-fabricated ‘umbrella system’ of political largesse. The subsequent bailouts of privileged corporations provoked a crisis of hegemony as disagreements developed over crisis management. On one side was Anwar and the financial establishment under his purview as the Minister of Finance. They found domestic support from business quarters that feared that Mahathir's confrontation with the financial market endangered the entire financial system. On the other side were Mahathir and Daim, to whom badly damaged domestic interests looked for state-directed rescue with public resources.Footnote ¹⁴ The lines between the two sides were not as hard as the international media depicted. However, the stakes were too high and the mood too desperate for subtle distinctions. Anwar was not an oligarch in the Daim mould. Anwar, like Mahathir and Daim, had cultivated selected businesspeople in a system of patronage and provision of credit to acquire shares (Gomez Reference Gomez2009: 359 − 360). Many Malay oligarchs had pandered to Anwar when he was Minister of Finance and Mahathir's ‘anointed successor’. Now, some oligarchs joined in plotting Anwar's fall for different, sometimes overlapping reasons. Some bore grievances against him from UMNO's previous factional battles. Others were uneasy over the anti-corruption warnings he issued as Acting Prime Minister. Yet others, whose interests had been damaged, feared that the Minister of Finance Anwar might institute IMF-styled pro-market reforms that could abolish NEP restructuring in the name of disciplining crony capitalism. There were also concerns that if he replaced Mahathir, Anwar would reconstitute the oligarchic order to favour his own camp.Footnote ¹⁵ More commonly, once the oligarchs decided that the Mahathir-Anwar rift was irreparable, even those not ill disposed towards Anwar abandoned him rather than risking Mahathir's wrath. Anwar was rumoured to have the party in his grasp; however, Mahathir commanded state power. The Malay oligarchs were self-preserving, deeply entrenched in the state-party-class axis and too firmly bound to “the holder of state power” to support reform.Footnote ¹⁶ On 1 September 1998, Mahathir imposed capital controls and commenced a program of debt restructuring and reflation (Khoo Reference Teik2003: 51–56). For most individual oligarchs, particularly those in the ‘UMNOputra’, fortunes badly dented by the financial crisis could not be swiftly repaired, because the high economic growth that fuelled corporate gambles in the early 1990s could not be restored. However, Mahathir salvaged the project of oligarchic reconstitution as best as he could. On 2 September, Mahathir dismissed Anwar from his government post and UMNO expelled the latter from the party the next day. Mahathir's first Deputy Prime Minister, Musa Hitam, stated, “To put it simply, this is about the search for the next leader who can ensure that the past leader and his cronies will not be in trouble” (Wain Reference Wain2009: 284).

Before returning to this political shock in the next section, this essay continues here with another convulsion of oligarchic order not long after Abdullah Badawi succeeded Mahathir as prime minister. Just as Mahathir's rise to power caused power shifts and changes in fortune in the oligarchy, Abdullah's tenure bore signs of oligarchic reconstitution suited to a ‘de-Mahathirising’ transition of power. Later, Mahathir complained that “Within two weeks [Abdullah] changed everything. Rejected all the things I had started, which he promised to deliver” (Wright Reference Wright2015).Footnote ¹⁷ Abdullah's cancellation of large projects launched by Mahathir partly signalled the reconstitution. In 2004, Abdullah cancelled a license for ‘nation-wide off-site betting on local and international sports events for 20 years’ that Mahathir had approved for Vincent Tan's company, Ascot Sports (Wain Reference Wain2009: 319). Perhaps ominously, Abdullah began an anti-corruption drive in which “for the first time in decades, charges over conflicts of interest were brought against prominent persons, including a former deputy cabinet minister, some top civil servants, and a prominent Chinese business tycoon once close to Mahathir” (Case Reference Case, Welsh and Chin2013: 344). The regime's hint of another eighteen cases of ‘high-profile’ corruption “shatter[ed] an ethos of elite impunity that had grown deeply ingrained in Malaysia” (Case Reference Case, Welsh and Chin2013: 344). However, the anti-corruption drive slackened while Abdullah's family members, his son-in-law, Khairy Jamaluddin, and favoured groups aligned with the latter became embroiled in business deals that had “the markings of a family business empire in the making” (Case Reference Case, Welsh and Chin2013: 346).

In mid-2006, Mahathir retaliated with strong public criticism of Abdullah, Khairy, and their corporate allies. Soon, Abdullah and Mahathir were trading accusations that their family members had benefitted improperly during their respective tenures (Wain Reference Wain2009: 323). To some degree, the Mahathir-Abdullah spat corroded Abdullah's influence, undermined UMNO's integrity, and rattled pro-UMNO segments of the Malay community. As Malay oligarchic disorder loomed once more, UMNO jettisoned one of Mahathir's post-1990 political achievements, the National Development Plan, which shed the language of ethnic quotas and targets without discarding NEP restructuring in practice. The political vehicle of Malay oligarchy pronounced an explicit non-negotiable reinstatement of NEP restructuring as the solution to their predicament. Between 2006 and 2007, UMNO repeatedly claimed that the 30 per cent Malay corporate ownership target set by the NEP had not been reached. At successive UMNO general assemblies, an assortment of delegates and leaders made pitiable reiterations of ‘Malay backwardness’, claiming that the Malays were still ‘behind’ other communities. They vowed to pursue Malay asset ownership targets and quotas more strenuously to enable Malay capital to catch up with non-Malay capital. They wanted NEP restructuring to be part of a “timeless Malay agenda”, as Najib Razak called it. Whatever this meant, UMNO wanted to tighten the oligarchic hold on state projects and allocation of largesse to reverse the misfortunes the Malay oligarchy suffered during the financial crisis. Therein lay the concrete answer to Searle's ten-year riddle of Malaysian capitalism: 35 years of NEP restructuring left the Malay oligarchy wanting to be timelessly protected.

Without Mahathir's ideological direction, the UMNO corporate elite could only recycle his pre-NEP idea of Malay backwardness, not noticing how the ‘Old Man’ had disowned that notion more than a decade earlier when he unveiled his ideologically popular Vision 2020 (Khoo Reference Teik1995: 337). Certainly, UMNO's displays of ethnic aggrandisement were vexatious to non-Malays and distasteful to Malays, who did not care for race baiting. However, these same displays ill-concealed a deeper reality, namely the reconstitution-in-progress of an oligarchic subset that had reeled before the financial and political crises of 1997–98. Each major point regarding the 2006–2007 juncture recapitulated the tensions in the trajectory of Malay oligarchic rise. The backpedalling talk of Malay backwardness, reactionary call to restore NEP restructuring, and nebulous allusion to a timeless Malay agenda expressed the inveterate apprehension of new Malay capital that lacked the ‘real capitalist’ credentials of independence and competitiveness. The formation of a corporate cabal around Abdullah and Khairy signified a move to make space in the Malay oligarchic order for newcomers. The appearance of ‘Abdullah's boys’ created rifts in the oligarchic ranks. Before long, ‘older players’ aligned with Mahathir and Daim viewed Abdullah's son-in-law Khairy as an interloper. The tokoh korporat of Mahathir-Daim sponsorship, not yet a safely consolidated oligarchic establishment, feared displacement when Khairy and his handpicked ‘Oxbridge boys’ were rumoured to have commandeered the ‘4^th Floor’ of the Prime Minister's office building. In parallel, although a rookie where veterans expected deference from novices, Khairy scaled UMNO's apex quickly, perhaps too quickly, becoming Deputy President of Pemuda UMNO. Along the state-party-axis, the strength of one's cables was crucial. Khairy might not have been where he was so quickly if his cable did not lead to his Prime Minister father-in-law. In the transition of leadership from Mahathir to Abdullah, the quarrel between a retired prime minister and his successor was the prelude to a proxy fight between oligarchic factions.

In addition, as wannabe UMNO-Malay oligarchs behaved before, Khairy risked ethnic gamesmanship to pursue personal ambitions and advance oligarchic aspirations.Footnote ¹⁸ At that juncture, the stance of Khairy and Pemuda UMNO bespoke an ethno-nationalism of the privileged aligned with the mutation of UMNO's foundational mission of grassroots-based Malay nationalism into Malay oligarchic capitalism. Their stand was ideologically at home in the UMNO General Assembly, whose leaders were socially detached from the rural Malays, working-class Malays, lower-level civil servants, and self-employed in small businesses, although the leaders claimed to be politically connected to the rest via a timeless Malay agenda.

A Decade of Resistance to Oligarchy (1998–2008)

On 2 September 1998, Mahathir sacrificed Anwar at the altar of the former's nationalist-capitalist project with its accompanying project of oligarchic reconstitution. Anwar's subsequent prosecution and imprisonment reaped a blowback. Financial crisis mutated into political crisis, and saving the oligarchy imperilled the regime. The inchoate Malay rebellion, called Reformasi, arose out of cultural revulsion at Anwar's maltreatment. However, as Reformasi grew into a movement of opposition parties and civil society, it turned to political economy in ways that challenged a weakened oligarchy. A dissident discourse developed within Reformasi that blamed the Anwar affair on korupsi, kolusi, nepotisme (or ‘KKN’),Footnote ¹⁹ or the corruption, collusion, and nepotism of an “opulent clique”,Footnote ²⁰ whom Anwar denounced before he was arrested and imprisoned. Malay recalcitrance armed with an anti-KKN discourse shattered the Malay oligarchy's hegemony for the first time and as only a popular Malay uprising could in the Malay-dominated system of ethnic politics. Support for UMNO slipped heavily in the Malay heartland and other electoral constituencies such as among civil servants and the youth (Maznah Reference Mohamad, Loh and Saravanamuttu2003) as Malay voters pursued the hitherto unthinkable idea of having a non-UMNO-led government (Khoo Reference Khoo1999). Saving Mahathir and UMNO from defeat in the November 1999 general election was the strong backing of non-Malay voters, especially Chinese voters. Mahathir received the quiet but frantic support of some Chinese oligarchs who needed to be rescued as much as their Malay counterparts.Footnote ²¹ Mostly based on pragmatic calculations, the majority of the Chinese gambled that an imperfect restoration of normalcy by Mahathir was more likely than painful though meaningful reform under Anwar. In the Chinese community, an ad hoc grouping of civil society organisations, Suqiu, made its ‘17 Demands’ on the regime before the election. Mahathir and BN acceded to the demands (but Mahathir bitterly attacked Suqiu after the election) (Khoo Reference Mohamad, Loh and Saravanamuttu2003: 126–127, 194). The majority of non-Malay voters rebuffed Anwar's call to Reformasi, thus “countering the anticipated loss of Malay votes” (Mahathir Reference Mohamad2011: 718). In Mahathir's words, “so strong was our Chinese support” (Mahathir Reference Mohamad2011: 719) that BN returned to power with a two-thirds majority.

Even so, the Malay rebellion had taken its toll: the Malay heartland spurned Mahathir, Malay voters inflicted heavy losses on UMNO, and a new generation of Malay youth defied the regime's authoritarian rule. Mahathir remained in power, but had almost no choice but to retire. He did so on 31 October 2003, and was succeeded by Abdullah Badawi. It fell to Abdullah to recover UMNO's standing with its most important constituency. Abdullah did so by offering material assistance to the lower Malay classes, making peace with the predominantly Malay civil service, and soothing the aggrieved Malay community by tacitly offering a closure to the Anwar affair. For the larger society, Abdullah evinced a gentler style of politicking, promised an inclusive approach to government, and expressed a desire for institutional reform. All this, combined with relief at Mahathir's departure and hope in Abdullah's arrival, formed the social basis of UMNO and BN's highest proportion of Parliamentary seats in the general election of 2004.

No sooner had Abdullah reached the height of his career than he and UMNO dissipated their political advantages. His regime failed to fulfil his promises of anti-corruption reform. Instead, high-profile cases of corruption were unprosecuted, while Mahathir's insinuations of corruption in the Abdullah-Khairy camp destroyed the image of a clean government under Abdullah. Even as oligarchy proved immune to judicial or administrative discipline, the UMNO general assemblies proceeded with alienating displays of oligarchic aggrandisement. From appearing to be a caring leader, Abdullah now looked inept and indifferent. The rising costs of living, including five fuel price increases between 2004 and 2006, infuriated urban residents. They formed a multi-ethnic population of mixed social strata already burdened by the privatisation of public services – sewage treatment and highways (proliferating in Kuala Lumpur) – that increased the types and levels of indirect taxes (Toh Reference Woon2008). The frustration with growing socio-economic disparities, including a widening intra-Malay income gap, was aggravated by the flaunting of wealth by several UMNO oligarchs. An escalating incidence of petty and violent crime in the major cities unsettled urban residents (Maznah Reference Mohamad2008), leaving middle-class suburbanites feeling unprotected by the police force.

By the time the memory of BN's electoral victory yielded to the histrionics of the UMNO General Assembly of 2007, the popular goodwill towards Abdullah in 2004 had bled away. In its place rose public cynicism towards the regime and, as if reliving Reformasi, readiness to confront it. Three large demonstrations at the end of 2007 showed the extent and depth of public disaffection.

The first public eruption of socio-political grievance was led by the Bar Council on 26 September 2007. Amidst nationwide outrage at Lingam-gate – an expose of suspected interference with judicial promotions – the Bar Council organised a Walk for Justice, a 2000-strong procession of lawyers and social activists to the Palace of Justice (the building of the Ministry of Justice), Putrajaya (the administrative complex). The protesters called for the head of the Lord Chief Justice and demanded an end to the corruption of the judiciary and punishment of all parties involved in Lingam-gate. The regime was reluctantly compelled to hold a Royal Commission of Inquiry into this matter.

A second mass demonstration took place on 10 November when the Coalition for Clean and Fair Elections (better known by its Malay acronym, BERSIH) held its inaugural rally to urge the Election Commission (EC) to implement four measures of electoral reform: the use of indelible ink during balloting, a clean-up of the electoral rolls of registered voters, abolition of postal ballots for the uniformed forces, and balanced access (for candidates) to print and broadcast media. Timed to perfection, the ‘illegal’ BERSIH rally proceeded on the day after the UMNO General Assembly concluded. Over 90 per cent of the participants were Malays, and their presence expressed a renewed Malay defiance of the regime that contrasted with the UMNO delegates’ non-Malay-bashing antics. Despite its forcible dispersal through police assault, the rally exerted the political impact its organisers wanted.

Finally came the show of strength of the Hindu Rights Action Front (HINDRAF), an ad hoc committee of 30 Indian NGOs formed in January 2006 to “create a discursive forum among hitherto divided Indian organizations” (Govindasamy Reference Govindasamy and Weiss2015: 119). Initially, HINDRAF did not have an anti-regime agenda. However, the Indian community and especially its poorer segments had been suffering worsening trends of socio-economic deprivation (Khoo Reference Jin and Teik2012). An Indian sense of being marginalised on ethnic grounds was aggravated by socio-cultural grievances arising from official indifference to the suspicious deaths of numerous Indian crime suspects while in police custody, the high-handed snatching of corpses of Indian Muslim converts from their families by religious bureaucrats, and the demolition of Hindu temples by local authorities (Loh Reference Loh, Siegel and Kahin2003, Willford Reference Willford2007). The likewise ‘illegal’ HINDRAF march proceeded in defiance of police assault and arrests. Overnight, HINDRAF galvanised an Indian rejection of MIC leaders’ acceptance of the Indian condition in obedience to UMNO (Govindasamy Reference Govindasamy and Weiss2015: 119).

The rallies failed to achieve their specific demands for judicial, electoral, and social reform. For all that, three mass protests within less than two months captured a many-sided eruption of socio-political dissent that was formidable because of its deeper anti-oligarchic resonance. The protest over Lingam-gate connected the scandal to the Salleh Abas impeachment of 1988 and Anwar trials by their common thread of oligarchic interference with the judiciary over decades. The BERSIH rally with its preponderant Malay presence showed how poorly the leadership of UMNO had misjudged the Malays: BERSIH was heir to the Malay-driven Reformasi with its mass opposition to UMNO and the KKN of the oligarchy. The HINDRAF uprising finished with the class and ethnic subordination to which ordinary Indians were assigned while their MIC controllers were barely tolerated as an oligarchic subset. At this historic moment, Chinese voters swung. They had saved Mahathir and UMNO in 1999 and supported Abdullah in 2004. However, a complacent and callous UMNO had told the Chinese to ‘lump it’ if they felt let down by a resurgence of ‘Malay supremacy’ or would not fall in with UMNO's demands. Thus, the Chinese swelled the convergence of dissent without holding a rally of their own, perversely perhaps without having done anything except to serve as the undeserved bogeyman of UMNO's demonology!

The end of 2007 brought mass Malay disenchantment, Indian grievance, Chinese resentment, civil society activism, and formal political opposition together in a rare convergence of dissent. At the 12^th General Election (GE12) on 8 March 2008, 49 per cent of the electorate voted for the opposition and cracked BN's hegemonic hold on the political system. The non-formalised partnership of the DAP, PAS, and PKR made electoral history by winning 82 of 222 seats in Parliament, denying the BN its customary two-thirds majority. Of the eleven states in Peninsular Malaysia, the principal political arena, the combined opposition, which soon created a formal coalition named Pakatan Rakyat (PR, or People's Pact), took control of the state governments of Kedah, Kelantan, Penang, Perak, and Selangor. Moreover, the opposition won ten of eleven parliamentary seats in Kuala Lumpur. However, because of its constitutional status as a Federal Territory, the national capital was still administered by an unelected City Hall controlled by the BN-led Federal government. A watershed had been reached and a two-coalition system no longer appeared beyond realisation, regardless that the PR was far from replacing the BN in governing the country.

If the political system was democratic and pluralist at its core, the BN could have come to terms with its loss of a two-thirds majority. After all, the coalition retained a large margin and UMNO kept its plurality in Parliament. If the cost of defeat was just political, the Federal government might have considered moderating its typical hostility towards opposition-led states. After all, the UMNO-led regime kept eight of the thirteen states by electoral victory, and Kuala Lumpur by legal default. However, the system's democratic features belied the repressive tendencies of those accustomed to centralised power. Meanwhile, the costs had to be counted in other terms.

The tsunami of 2008, as the wave of opposition sentiment and victory was popularly called, held ominous implications for one especially interested group, the Malay oligarchy. In Parliament, the regime could expect a tighter scrutiny of its policies and conduct of economic affairs. The sizeable presence of an opposition pressing for transparency, accountability, and good governance against KKN presaged obstacles in the rent-seeking paths of the oligarchy. Wherever the Opposition ruled at the state level, the ‘UMNOputra’ lost its old positions of power and forfeited control over state resources. A confident, established oligarchy might have cut its losses, looked to cultivate the newly empowered, and manoeuvred to replace old cables with new ones. However, with their weaknesses and insecurities, the Malay oligarchy could hardly avert a fear of falling from exalted status and assured wealth.

At that juncture, which ushered in a stalemate between the regime and opposition, it was Abdullah's turn to pay the price of electoral defeat. He was forced out of the UMNO presidency and the premiership. Another change in leadership did not mean the resolution of the underlying flaws and insecurities of oligarchic reconstitution. The primary issue was not that the oligarchy was reconstituted, but that it was not sufficiently constituted. The oligarchy was structurally unstable because of the brevity and rapidity of its social formation, dependency on the state, and manipulation of political cables. Not rooted in particular economic sectors with unquestioned performance, the oligarchy could not overcome its lack of self-reliance, a handicap caused by its recourse to rent-seeking, cronyism, and largesse. That left oligarchic consolidation vulnerable to politico-economic crises and disruption. Besides, oligarchic membership was not limited by birth or pedigree. Many interlopers aimed for ascendance by seizing what cables they could along the state-party-class axis. Continual intra-oligarchic rivalry corroded the capacity for self-regulation and stable accommodation with state institutions. Moreover, the oligarchy did not rule with the authoritative ethos of a settled ruling class (other than its royal component). Indeed, Malay oligarchy suffered from mood swings. As its ideological effusions showed, UMNO, the vehicle of oligarchy, was euphoric when rapid growth brought plentiful largesse but depressed when economic contractions diminished opportunities for quick wealth. The Malay oligarchic subset, aggrandising but anxiety-ridden, stood at the heart of many crises because of its paradoxical character. Politically, it was the centre of power, but economically, the weak link in the oligarchic chain.

Viewed as such, each major conflict after 1969 – the fall of Harun Idris,Footnote ²² UMNO's ‘communist witch-hunt’,Footnote ²³ the split into Team A and Team B, the Anwar Ibrahim affair, and Abdullah's ouster – was an episode of intra-Malay and intra-oligarchic strife. Whether the antagonists engaged in diversionary ethnic brinkmanship or dragged other quarters such as the judiciary into the fray, each episode could not be separated from struggles over power at the apex of UMNO, which remains the political vehicle of oligarchy. The conflicts were intense, because they determined who would rise and join the exalted club of oligarchy, who would fall and exit it, or who would be bailed out or neglected in times of economic distress. The crises were destabilising as their impacts and fallouts were transmitted along the state-party-class axis, undermining the integrity of state institutions, corroding the cohesion of the ruling party, and reshuffling the interests of the capitalist class.

Epilogue: Oligarchic Impermanence and the Fall of the UMNO-BN Regime

Abdullah's dramatic departure hid a twist in the trajectory of oligarchic reconstitution introduced by Mahathir's handling of the 1997 crisis. Mahathir saved oligarchy from collapse only to trim the corporate power of individual oligarchs. He used Government Linked Investment Companies (GLICs) to rescue large Malay-owned conglomerates such as Renong, Malaysian Airlines, Proton, and Konsortium Perkapalan (which belonged to Mahathir's son). He also used Government Linked Companies (GLCs) to take control of certain assets of Anwar's Malay and non-Malay corporate allies (Gomez Reference Gomez2009: 362).Footnote ²⁴ Significantly, the rise of GLICs and GLCs signalled the eclipse of most Malay corporate figures. For example, by 2001, GLICs owned seven of the top ten publicly listed firms whereas not one of the top ten firms was owned by a Malay.Footnote ²⁵ A decade after the 1997 crisis, “none of the Malays groomed by Mahathir, Anwar and Daim retain[ed] control of any major enterprise” (Gomez Reference Gomez2009: 371, Reference Gomez, Padmanaban, Kamaruddin, Bhalla and Fisal2017: 78 − 86, Appendix 2.1). This setback for the Malay oligarchic subset contrasted with the position of their Chinese counterparts. Many of the latter, although badly hit by the same crisis, “recovered and regained their positions in the [Kuala Lumpur Stock Exchange] list of companies” (Lee Reference Hing, Welsh and Chin2013: 490, 490 − 493).

The Abdullah regime sought to transform the GLICs and GLCs by recruiting professional managers to improve their performance and reconstituting their boards of directors to reduce political influence over corporate activities (Wong Reference Ching, Ching, Jomo and Fay2005: 166–172). However, Abdullah's leadership was undone by the 2007 − 2008 surge of popular disaffection. Najib Razak continued to consolidate the GLICs and GLCs as part of a new economic model that proposed reducing state economic intervention and dismantling ‘race-based affirmative action’. Najib's plan was undercut by UMNO-BN's loss of the popular vote in the 2013 general election. Fearing that Anwar Ibrahim might next lead the opposition to outright victory, UMNO and Malay NGOs forced Najib to adopt a Bumiputera Economic Empowerment (BEE) policy in September 2013 (Brophy Reference Brophy2018). With the BEE policy, the Najib regime made two reversions. First, Najib vowed to continue NEP-style affirmative action in business, reviving in effect a ‘true NEP-style policy’ (Funston Reference Funston and Welsh2016: 105). Second, by involving the GLICs and GLCs in implementing the BEE policy, he reverted to the reliance on state-owned corporate entities of an earlier NEP era. Abdullah and Najib's conceptions of corporate transformation did not have a new pathway for oligarchic resurgence. They expected the professional managers to operate the GLICs and GLCs without the direct influence of UMNO politicians. They envisaged that those professionals would remain managerial rather than entrepreneurial,Footnote ²⁶ and elite rather than oligarchic. However, there was already concern that the GLICs and GLCs “present[ed] a formidable barrier to both competition and the entry of new private firms” (Menon and Ng Reference Menon and Ng2017: 520). In that concern echoed the tensions that arose between state-owned vehicles and an emerging Malay capitalist class during the period before privatisation.

These issues did not occupy public debate, because the legitimacy of the Abdullah and Najib regimes was crucially torn by exposures of large-scale and high-level corruption. Abdullah’s reformist initiatives were overshadowed by corporate scandals that allegedly implicated even his own family members (Vithiatharan and Gomez Reference Vithiatharan and Gomez2014: 608). Public perception associated UMNO under Abdullah Badawi with “corruption, ostentatious living, abuse of power, and rank stupidity at the top”, according to Abdullah Ahmad, an old ideologue of Malay supremacy who likened UMNO's leaders to “Chiang Kai-shek's corrupt nationalists in Shanghai in the nineteen-thirties” (quoted in Buruma 2009). Najib's promise of ‘transparency’ grated against ‘scandals galore’ (Vithiatharan and Gomez Reference Vithiatharan and Gomez2014: 610) in which mismanagement of public funds spread with impunity and the suppression of criticism (Funston Reference Funston and Welsh2016: 85–95). Beyond rent-seeking via actual corporate activities went massive corruption that maintained favoured aspiring oligarchs in ostentations and extravagant lifestyles.

The unchecked corruption culminated in the scandal of “1 Malaysia Development Berhad” (or “1MDB”), called the “heist of the century” by Sarawak Report which broke the story in 2015 (Sarawak Report 2015). At home, official investigations of Najib's personal entanglement in the suspected fraud and money laundering of 1MDB were suppressed. Parallel investigations and prosecutions linked to 1MDB, however, deepened in Switzerland, Singapore, and the USA. The case of 1MDB has been critically theorized as an instance of the ‘containment of conflict’ (Rodan Reference Rodan2018: 203–210). One cannot force the details of the 1MDB affair into the theme of oligarchic reconstitution, or trace the politics around it to rivalry between oligarchic factions. There are many uncovered angles to each. Even so, there are uncanny traces of oligarchic presence. With his Pahang aristocrat pedigree, Najib conducted his life and politics as a super-oligarch while his wife, Rosmah Mansor, took luxurious living to excess. The widely presumed mastermind of 1MDB, Low Taek Jho, was a young ethnic Chinese interloper who, being intimate with the Najib family, penetrated the nexus of political influence, bureaucratic power, and corporate finance. Mahathir, who reconstituted oligarchy as part of a nationalist-capitalist project, began to see in Najib not an oligarch who had a nobler developmental mission but a kleptocrat whose reckless ways endangered the economy and the nation. Although he was in prison (at the time of earlier writing), Anwar Ibrahim, still the reformist who had inspired a two-decade struggle against oligarchic greed, denounced what he was able to learn of Najib's “kleptocratic regime”. All considered, the 1MDB affair, which dominated the politics of the latter part of the Najib regime, bore the leitmotif of oligarchic reconstitution as a source of political turbulence.

As the notoriety of 1MDB escalated, UMNO's leadership suffered its latest convulsion. Deputy President Muhiyuddin Yasin, Vice-President Shafie Apdal, and Supreme Council member Mukhriz Mahathir privately objected to Najib's handling of 1MDB. Najib forced them out of government and party. Najib's purge did not tear UMNO apart but it created new loci of anti-UMNO politics. In this new milieu of late 2015, Mahathir returned to active politics, this time in the reinvented persona of an anti-regime dissident. With Muhiyuddin and Mukhriz and other ex-UMNO stalwarts, Mahathir formed a new party, Parti Pribumi Bersatu Malaysia (Bersatu, or United Pribumi of Malaysia).Footnote ²⁷ Mahathir startlingly reconciled publicly with Anwar Ibrahim in September 2016, and then led Bersatu to form a new coalition, Pakatan Harapan (Harapan, or Pact of Hope), with the other opposition parties (Khoo Reference Teik2018). Thus was “hope” restored to an opposition which had seemed headed for a disastrous defeat by a Najib-led BN in the 14^th General Election (GE14).

It is beyond this essay to discuss the political manoeuvres that pitted BN and Harapan against each other. When it was held on May 9, 2018, GE14 produced a Harapan triumph against all odds and virtually all pre-election predictions. A day later, almost incredulously Mahathir, two months away from being 93 years old, was again sworn in as Prime Minister – nearly 37 years after he was first appointed to that position and fifteen years after he had retired from office. What did this first ever “regime change” in Malaysia hold for oligarchic reconstitution? The answer awaits further developments in political economy. But a few tentative observations may be offered by way of conclusion. First, and true to its election campaign promise, the present Mahathir regime seems bent on eradicating corruption in high places. The regime has resumed official investigation of 1MDB, coordinated with probes in foreign jurisdictions. The imminent prosecution of 1MDB's central figures, most of all, Najib and Jho Low (a fugitive outside the country), signals a significant halt, if not yet the certain end, to opaque and non-accountable ways of awarding and managing state contracts and projects – that was a former pathway of oligarchic ascendance for politically powerful individuals and corporations. Second, a defeated UMNO has been deserted by most of its BN partners while Harapan strives to consolidate itself as a stable ruling coalition. The Harapan plan is to have Mahathir stay in office for two years, to use his personal prestige and vast administrative experience to “correct the wrongdoings of the previous regime”. His successor would be Anwar, who was freed by a full royal pardon a few days after GE14. If its plan is not disrupted by fresh crises, Harapan should be able to stave off any early return of UMNO to power. For now, UMNO without the control of state resources can continue to be as the political vehicle of oligarchy. Finally, Harapan's triumph at GE14 was the culmination of a twenty-year popular struggle for diverse kinds of reform. Many leaders of the struggle, Anwar being the best known, were saved from political oblivion by mass dissident surges. From its inception in Reformasi, the struggle had been discursively populist and implicitly anti-oligarchic. If the popular triumph sustains the drive towards democratic, juridical and bureaucratic reform, it would erect safeguards against a repeat of oligarchic aggrandizement.