Malaysia’s 2022 General Election

This edited volume of essays, written by twenty-four established and emerging scholars, is the first – and an ambitious – attempt to study Malaysia’s 2022 general election. That most complex election ever was held under exceptional circumstances. Voters were tired of high-level corruption, exhausted by the Covid-19 pandemic, and angered by past regimes’ failures to fix an inflationary economy. The politics of the election were unsettling. Malay politics, once a key source of stability, was badly fragmented. Voters also had to confront manipulated ethnoreligious tensions and simmering regionalist divisions. The electoral outcomes were ambiguous: a hung parliament and the eventual rule of an Anwar Ibrahim–led coalition of coalitions. Neither result showed a party, coalition or personality that had sufficient authority to undertake the clearly needed reforms of Malaysian political economy and society. Malaysia’s 2022 General Election: Crafting Power in a Crowded Arena explores the electoral campaigns and their results in various states from many personal and interest group perspectives. This book boldly offers insights into what the 2022 general election was and where it will take Malaysia. —Khoo Boo Teik, Professor Emeritus, National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies, Tokyo, Author of Paradoxes of Mahathirism and Anwar Ibrahim: Tenacious in Dissent, Hopeful in Power