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4 Meredith L. Weiss and Faisal S. Hazis

status and rights; the prevailing assumption was that Bersatu, and Mahathir
speci cally, could reassure rural Malay voters in particular that they would not
lose their race-based privileges under a new regime (see Faisal Hazis’s chapter).
What made the outcome of GE14 potentially predictable were several
of the issues galvanizing voters. Looming especially large was Najib himself:
he and his wife were embroiled in Malaysia’s largest corruption scandal to
date, centred around the 1Malaysia Development Berhad (1MDB) sovereign
wealth fund. Other corruption sagas also dampened support for the BN;
most salient, considering whose vote changed, seems to have been a botched
initial public o ering of FELDA Global Ventures, a plantation operator
built on the holdings of rubber and oil palm smallholders under the Federal
Land Development Authority (FELDA). Meanwhile, as Haris Zuan’s chapter
details, young voters faced rising debt and diminished prospects, while a
combination of factors, including an aggressively resurgent Malay-Muslim
right wing and dissatisfaction with BN governance, sustained the movement
out of the BN, apparent since 2008, among non-Malay, especially Chinese,
voters (see Helen Ting’s chapter). e fact that it was Mahathir who was
leading the opposition charge raised eyebrows, given both his age and
dubious reformist credentials, but he also promised a known, steady hand
at the wheel—and one likely both to maintain ethnic preferences and tamp
down rising Malay-Muslim ethnonationalism. Yet the promise of a more
Islamist administration, too, was a continuing pull-factor for many Malay-
Muslim voters, both allowing PAS to maintain much of its support and
luring voters looking for an alternative to UMNO, particularly as both PAS
and Amanah re ned their candidate-selection, messaging, and outreach (see
Hew Wai Weng’s and David Kloos’s chapters). States’ rights were a key issue
in East Malaysia, the Borneo states of Sabah and Sarawak, but subnational
loyalties also mattered on the peninsula; the coalitions crafted state-speci c
appeals to woo those voters. Still other concerns and prospects motivated
other voters. And the opposition invested in new campaign tactics—most
notably, big-data-driven appeals, capitalizing on near-universal smartphone
penetration, on which Ross Tapsell’s chapter focuses.
In short, the chapters to come con rm both the real complexity of the
Malaysian electorate and the di culty of determining the extent to which
this result is more than a one-time protest vote. However, as the longer-term
trend suggests, the issues and identities salient now have deeper roots dating
back at least to the Reformasi movement of 1998, as Johan Saravanamuttu’s
contribution explains. Antipathy toward Najib or relief at the return of
the developmentalist visionary Mahathir surely tipped the scales to some

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