Following a coronary bypass in February 1981, Hussein Onn resigned as prime minister, after serving only four years in the job. From then on Malaysia's longest-serving premier till date, Mahathir Mohamad, stepped into the breach. In July 1981 the new team of Mahathir and Musa, or the “2-M”, took the helm of UMNO and the reins of the government of Malaysia. These same two people were earlier considered by Tunku Abdul Rahman to be “ultras”, or extremists within UMNO, and were expelled from the party for a time. Much has been written about Mahathir, including books by himself, which this chapter will draw on as may be relevant to electoral politics under his long tenure of twenty-two years as premier. Although Mahathir's premiership lasted from 1982 till 2003, this chapter will only cover four general elections held under his term. The last general election during the Mahathir years was in 1999 — a pivotal election deserving of a more extensive treatment. Thus, following this chapter I will devote the next to the Reformasi Movement and the 1999 election, thought by many to be a transformative moment of Malaysian history.

MAHATHIR AT THE HELM

From the outset I would like to stress that while it is hard to avoid the fact that Mahathir dominated and to a great extent “personalized” UMNO and Malaysian politics (Hwang 2003), this politics was embedded within the discursive and institutional constraints that we have already foregrounded in this book. These constraints are the electoral system and the consociational imperatives of power sharing politics in a multi-ethnic society, overlaid with the often unforgiving constraints of Malay and Islamic politics, which any leader of Malaysia could only eschew at his peril. Furthermore, as we will show in political economy terms, Mahathir was also functioning within the parameters of the country's interventionist developmental state and capitalist system, which he cleverly turned to UMNO's advantage through the practice of “party capitalism”. However, this same factor of party capitalism, with its corollary of corruption and pork-barrel politics, has become UMNO's bane and the potential source of its political decline. We will return to these points in fuller fashion; the analysis in this chapter will cover the first four elections of Mahathir's tenure.