Ismail Sabri’s stock rises
by default
As stopgap PM he gave allocations for opposition MPs without fuss and enacted an anti-hopping law, reformasi steps now viewed as a big deal.
From Terence Netto
Malaysia’s ninth prime minister Ismail Sabri Yaakob’s stock is rising by default of Anwar Ibrahim.
Ismail, regarded as an accidental PM, accomplished two things in his brief spell as premier between August 2021 and October 2022, for which his reputation is now mounting.
He gave opposition MPs their annual financial allocations and enacted an anti-hopping law, both key demands the MPs held as imperative for their support of a stable Ismail tenure as PM.
Equal allocations for opposition MPs and an anti-hopping law have long been major priorities of the reformasi movement that the travails of Anwar Ibrahim in late 1998 caused to happen in Malaysian politics.
Both measures were important items in a long list of steps the reformasi movement pushed for in the near quarter century it took for its Pied Piper, Anwar Ibrahim, to become PM.
But when Anwar arrived in office in November 2022, he foot-dragged on the reforms, presumably from fear the Malay right wing, wary of his association with the DAP, would harden its resistance to him.
As he dithered, supporters of reformasi became disenchanted with him even as the Malay right wing crowd and the Islamists remained unpersuaded by Anwar’s campaign against corruption.
In this welter of reformist disgruntlement and Malay/Islamist sullenness, the stock of Ismail Sabri, long regarded as no more than an Umno journeyman, rose by reason of the relative ease with which he satisfied the two key demands of the reformasi crowd.
His brief prime ministerial tenure, barely 14 months, remains undistinguished but by comparison with the niggardly pace of reform under Anwar, his span is being looked at anew.
More so now, when the Anwar government has imposed several conditions for the opposition to accede to before it can be given the annual financial allocations that MPs need for their constituency work.
These conditions include a declaration of an MP’s assets and assurance of support for the completion of Anwar government’s tenure until the next general election.
The former is entirely new and was required only of MPs taking up cabinet and other federal positions while the latter is an infringement of an MP’s democratic right to choose who is going to govern the country.
Furthermore, in the list of conditions imposed no mention is made of the quantum of the allocation that an MP would receive.
In other words, the allocations cake is waved but its size is hidden.
Small wonder that political pundits are beginning to look at Ismail Sabri’s tenure as a brief span of democratic propriety before the start of an Anwar tenure, though much-awaited, has become puzzling.
It is an illustration of the truth of the saying:
Be careful what you wish for.
Terence Netto is a senior journalist and an FMT reader.
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