DR Mahathir Mohamad is Malaysia’s best hope and Prime Minister Najib Razak’s worst nightmare, a commentary published on the South China Morning Post said today.

The commentary, written by Tokyo-based journalist William Pesek, said the former prime minister’s return to the political arena and the alliance with his former deputy Anwar Ibrahim, whom he jailed, would jolt Malaysia out of complacency even if the opposition failed to capture Putrajaya.

Pesek said Malaysians, like many in other Asian countries, would tolerate dodgy government practices and cronyism as long as living standards continued to rise, but Najib’s administration had slowed economic growth.

He said this had caused Malaysia to remain largely stagnant, and even regressed in some areas, in the past eight years while regional neighbours Indonesia and the Philippines moved forward.

Pesek said Najib had promised to dismantle affirmative action policies created by his father, the second prime minister Abdul Razak Hussein, when he assumed office but instead doubled down to gain political mileage once he was embroiled in scandals.

Many of these scandals, he said, surround 1Malaysia Development Berhad (1MDB), which sparked money laundering investigations in several countries and scared off foreign investors.

Pesek said seeing Malaysia slide backwards to become a cautionary tale for other countries proved too much for Dr Mahathir, enabling him to form an alliance with Anwar to wrest power from Najib.

He compared Dr Mahathir’s influence with that of Singapore’s late Lee Kuan Yew and said his words still carried much weight, even though he was no angel and was probably just as damaging to Malaysia’s reputation during his tenure as prime minister.

Pesek also pointed out if Najib started to clamp down on dissent and abuse the law out of desperation, it would not be unlike what Dr Mahathir would have done when he was prime minister. – July 26, 2017.