Anwar Ibrahim has spent almost a quarter of a century moving between the centre of Malaysian power and its political margins. He served as deputy prime minister during the 1990s, appeared positioned to succeed Mahathir Mohamad, was dismissed during the Asian financial crisis, imprisoned, became the country’s most prominent opposition leader, returned to parliament, entered an extraordinary alliance with Mahathir and then watched that alliance collapse before he could become prime minister.
On Thursday, after one of the most inconclusive elections in Malaysian history, Anwar finally entered the prime minister’s office.
The route through which he arrived may be more important than the personal story.
Malaysia voted on 19 November, but no political coalition won the 112 seats required for a majority in the 222-member parliament. Anwar’s multi-ethnic Pakatan Harapan coalition emerged with the largest number of seats, while former prime minister Muhyiddin Yassin’s Perikatan Nasional performed strongly, helped by substantial gains for the Malaysian Islamic Party, PAS. The long-dominant Barisan Nasional coalition suffered another major setback.
Malaysia therefore produced its first hung parliament.
For several days, rival political leaders attempted to demonstrate that they possessed enough support to form a government. Eventually, after consultations among parties and Malaysia’s hereditary rulers, King Sultan Abdullah appointed Anwar prime minister. Anwar has subsequently begun constructing a broad governing arrangement including political forces that spent much of the election campaigning against one another.
That last fact makes the result politically uncomfortable.
If voters choose Party A because they want Party B removed, and Party A subsequently forms a government with Party B, what exactly did the election decide?
This is one of the fundamental problems of coalition democracy.
Voters choose parties.
Politicians choose coalitions.
Those choices do not always point in the same direction.
In a two-party system, the connection between vote and government is comparatively clear. If Labour defeats the Conservatives in Britain with a parliamentary majority, Labour governs. A voter broadly understands which government their ballot helps create.
Multiparty systems provide more precise representation because voters can choose among several ideological alternatives.
The cost is uncertainty after the election.
A voter can know exactly which party they supported without knowing which government that party will eventually join.
Representation becomes more accurate at the input and less predictable at the output.
Malaysia is experiencing that trade-off very visibly.
Pakatan Harapan did not win a parliamentary majority. Anwar therefore cannot simply implement its programme alone. He needs support from politicians outside his coalition.
That gives smaller or defeated political groups bargaining power disproportionate to their electoral performance.
At first this can look undemocratic. Why should a party rejected by large numbers of voters still influence government?
Because nobody else received enough support to govern without it.
A hung parliament does not mean voters failed to produce a result.
It means voters produced a result in which no political bloc possesses the right to govern alone.
That is itself political information.
Politicians then have to negotiate around it.
The distinction matters because compromise is sometimes described as betrayal when it may actually be the most accurate response to electoral fragmentation.
If 40% of voters support one coalition, 30% another and 25% another, there is no democratic mechanism through which the 40% can simply pretend the other 55% does not exist.
Coalition-building forces political leaders to recognise that arithmetic.
The resulting government will inevitably disappoint ideological purists because nobody receives everything.
That is not necessarily a defect.
Compromise is what pluralism looks like after votes are counted.
But there is an obvious limit to this argument.
Coalition politics can become so detached from electoral promises that citizens reasonably conclude politicians are bargaining over offices rather than principles.
Malaysia has particularly strong reasons for that suspicion because the country has spent the last four years experiencing extraordinary political manoeuvring.
The 2018 election was historic. Barisan Nasional, the coalition that had governed Malaysia continuously since independence, finally lost power. Pakatan Harapan won on a reformist platform, and Mahathir Mohamad returned as prime minister despite having previously led the political establishment the opposition had spent years fighting.
The arrangement itself contained a remarkable compromise. Anwar had once been Mahathir’s deputy and then his political enemy. Yet their movements cooperated because removing Barisan Nasional required a broader coalition than either could construct alone.
The strategy worked electorally.
Then governing exposed the contradictions.
In 2020, defections and coalition manoeuvring caused the Pakatan Harapan government to collapse in what became known as the Sheraton Move. Muhyiddin Yassin became prime minister without a general election. He later resigned and was replaced by Ismail Sabri Yaakob, again without voters directly producing the change through another national election.
Malaysia therefore had three prime ministers between the 2018 and 2022 elections.
Britain has just experienced its own rapid prime-ministerial turnover, but Malaysia’s instability involved a more fundamental reshuffling of parliamentary coalitions. MPs changed alliances, parties split and governments were reconstructed from the same parliament.
Every move could be defended through parliamentary arithmetic.
The cumulative effect weakened the relationship between election results and government.
This is why the 2022 election mattered so much.
It gave voters an opportunity to reset the parliamentary distribution after four years in which political elites had repeatedly rearranged it themselves.
The irony is that voters produced another fragmented result.
That does not mean elections failed.
It means Malaysian society itself is politically fragmented.
The constitution cannot manufacture a majority that voters did not provide.
The challenge is therefore creating a government broad enough to function without returning immediately to the defections and manoeuvring that characterised the previous parliament.
This is where Anwar’s coalition strategy becomes more defensible.
A narrow government depending on a few MPs would remain permanently vulnerable to defections. Every legislator could become pivotal. Political bargaining would continue continuously because a handful of defections could collapse the government.
A broader coalition can reduce that vulnerability.
The logic resembles portfolio diversification.
If your entire majority depends on three MPs, each possesses enormous bargaining power.
If the government possesses support well beyond the minimum threshold, individual defections become less consequential.
Political stability can therefore increase when coalitions become broader than mathematically necessary.
But breadth introduces ideological incoherence.
The more parties included, the fewer policies everyone agrees on.
A unity government may be very good at surviving.
It may be much worse at deciding.
This is the same institutional trade-off we saw in Iraq last month.
An inclusive coalition reduces the probability that excluded groups destabilise the government.
The same inclusion can make government slower because every important decision requires agreement among more actors.
Stability and decisiveness can pull in opposite directions.
Malaysia’s circumstances make that particularly important because the political blocs represent more than ordinary differences over tax rates.
Questions of ethnicity, religion and national identity remain deeply embedded in Malaysian politics.
Malaysia’s population is majority ethnic Malay and Muslim, alongside large ethnic Chinese and Indian minorities and indigenous communities, particularly in Sabah and Sarawak. Since independence, political institutions have included policies granting Bumiputera, principally Malays and indigenous peoples, preferential access in areas such as education, business and public-sector opportunities.
Supporters argue that these policies address historical economic inequalities and protect the political position of the Malay majority.
Critics argue that permanent ethnic preference can reinforce communal politics and produce unfairness or inefficiency.
The debate is difficult because it combines redistribution with identity.
An ordinary welfare policy can be changed according to income.
An ethnic preference becomes connected to how communities understand their position inside the state.
Political reform therefore creates fears not simply of losing money but of losing status.
That makes compromise harder.
Pakatan Harapan has generally presented itself as more multi-ethnic and reform-oriented than several of its rivals. Perikatan Nasional’s support is more heavily concentrated among Malay-Muslim voters, while PAS’s strong performance indicates that political Islam remains a powerful force.
The election therefore reveals a Malaysia divided not simply between government and opposition but between competing visions of how ethnicity and religion should structure politics.
Anwar cannot resolve those questions by declaring national unity.
He has to govern through them.
This is where his own political biography becomes useful and potentially contradictory.
Anwar began his career with strong roots in Islamic activism before entering the dominant UMNO party. Over decades, his politics evolved towards a reformist and multi-ethnic opposition coalition. He therefore understands both the Malay-Muslim political establishment and the constituencies demanding institutional reform.
That breadth may help him construct coalitions.
It can also allow opponents to accuse him of saying different things to different audiences.
Coalition politicians always face this problem.
Flexibility looks like pragmatism to allies and opportunism to opponents.
The distinction is difficult to establish from rhetoric alone.
Outcomes matter.
Does compromise preserve core principles while conceding secondary issues?
Or does the politician abandon whichever principle blocks access to office?
That is the line between democratic bargaining and simple power-seeking.
There is no objective formula.
One useful test is transparency.
If parties explain why they are cooperating, what programme they have agreed and which policies each side has compromised on, voters can evaluate the bargain.
If coalition negotiations consist primarily of private negotiations over ministries and appointments, suspicion becomes much more justified.
Coalition agreements therefore have democratic value beyond administrative convenience.
They convert elite bargaining into something citizens can inspect.
Malaysia needs that particularly badly after the opacity of the political manoeuvring since 2020.
The monarchy also played an important role this week, which makes Malaysia constitutionally unusual. Malaysia is a federal constitutional monarchy in which nine hereditary rulers select one of themselves to serve as Yang di-Pertuan Agong, or king, for a five-year term.
The monarch normally performs largely constitutional and ceremonial functions, but hung parliaments create moments where royal judgement becomes more consequential because somebody has to determine which politician is most likely to command parliamentary confidence.
King Sultan Abdullah consulted political leaders and the Conference of Rulers before appointing Anwar.
That does not mean the king simply chose Malaysia’s government according to personal preference.
The relevant constitutional question was who could command a majority in parliament.
Still, the episode demonstrates how reserve powers become more visible when ordinary party mechanisms fail to produce a clear result.
This resembles the British monarchy’s theoretical constitutional role, although Malaysia’s recent political instability has required the king to become more directly involved in determining who can form governments.
Reserve powers are paradoxical.
Their usefulness depends partly on rarely being needed.
When they become routine, unelected institutions begin carrying political responsibility they were designed to avoid.
Malaysia therefore needs coalition stability partly to return the monarchy to a less politically exposed position.
A constitutional referee is safest when most games do not require the referee to determine who is allowed onto the field.
There is another institutional development that may improve stability: Malaysia passed an anti-party-hopping law this year intended to restrict MPs from switching parties after election.
The reform was a direct response to the instability created by defections after 2018.
This is democratic error correction in a very concrete form.
A political system experienced a failure mode.
Citizens became angry that legislators could effectively reverse electoral outcomes by changing allegiance.
Parliament changed the rules to make repetition harder.
But even this reform involves a trade-off.
Party-switching can undermine voters when an MP elected under one banner suddenly joins another government.
Yet completely rigid party discipline can reduce legislators to delegates controlled by party leadership.
What happens when a party itself changes ideology?
What if an MP has a genuine moral objection to government policy?
Representative democracy contains tension between the mandate belonging to the individual legislator and the mandate belonging to the party label under which they were elected.
Anti-defection laws solve one problem by strengthening parties.
They can create another by weakening individual parliamentary independence.
Again, institutional reform moves the trade-off rather than eliminating it.
Malaysia’s experience since 2018 therefore provides an unusually useful case study in how democracies learn.
First, voters ended six decades of one-coalition dominance.
Then the replacement coalition collapsed.
Political elites reconstructed governments without elections.
Public frustration increased.
Parliament introduced rules against defections.
Voters returned to the polls.
They produced a hung parliament.
Now politicians are trying another model: a broad coalition government.
None of this looks particularly elegant.
Democratic development rarely is.
Political systems learn through failure because nobody knows in advance how constitutional rules will interact with actual political incentives.
The important question is whether institutions update after failure.
This is where Malaysia differs from an authoritarian system. Political instability has been substantial, but competition remains open enough that different parties can win seats, governments can change and voters can punish established coalitions.
Barisan Nasional’s decline demonstrates this particularly clearly.
For decades, it appeared almost synonymous with the Malaysian state.
Then it lost.
Once citizens discover that a dominant party can lose, political expectations change permanently.
Competition becomes credible.
That may be worth some short-term instability.
A political system moving from one-coalition dominance towards genuine multiparty competition needs time to develop new coalition norms.
Germany and the Netherlands have decades of experience negotiating governments among several parties. Malaysia’s competitive party system is much younger.
Political actors therefore need to learn behaviours that established coalition democracies take for granted: written agreements, predictable bargaining, acceptance of opposition and stable rules governing confidence.
Institutions are partly habits.
Habits require repetition.
Anwar’s government may therefore matter less because one long-frustrated politician finally achieved his ambition and more because it tests whether Malaysia can transform fragmented electoral competition into stable coalition government.
If the coalition survives by distributing offices while avoiding reform, it may stabilise politics without improving it.
If it pursues reforms so aggressively that partners abandon it, Malaysia may return to instability.
The optimal strategy probably lies somewhere uncomfortable between.
That is usually where coalition government lives.
There is also a personal lesson in Anwar’s story that is difficult to ignore. He spent decades believing he would eventually become prime minister. Political alliances repeatedly collapsed around him. He was imprisoned twice. His former mentor became his opponent, then his ally, then effectively an obstacle again.
Now, at 75, he has finally reached the office.
That kind of political persistence can produce either maturity or obsession.
The test is what happens once the objective is achieved.
Politicians who spend decades trying to acquire power sometimes discover that acquiring it has become the purpose rather than the means.
The democratic question is what the power is for.
Malaysia faces rising living costs, concerns over corruption, economic inequality, institutional reform and deep communal divisions. Anwar’s historical narrative cannot solve any of them.
His government will eventually be judged according to outcomes.
That may be the healthiest conclusion to his extraordinary political journey.
Democracy allowed him to lose repeatedly without disappearing permanently.
It allowed his opponents to govern.
It allowed alliances to change.
Eventually, enough political actors concluded that he should form a government.
Now the romantic part ends.
A coalition agreement has to become policy.
Political reform has to become institutions.
Economic promises have to confront budgets.
Former enemies have to sit in the same government.
That is much less dramatic than Anwar finally walking into the prime minister’s office.
It is also what the office is for.
Malaysia’s election did not produce one winner powerful enough to govern alone.
Perhaps that was not electoral failure.
Perhaps voters produced a parliament in which nobody was entitled to ignore everyone else.
The next question is whether Malaysia’s politicians can learn the difference between compromise and betrayal quickly enough to make that parliament work.
