What happened was this: Up until this point (since Independance was granted in 1957) the country has been ruled by 3 parties, formed into an Alliance. I speak of UMNO (united malay nationals organisation), the MCA (malaysian chinese association) and MIC (Malaysian Indian congress). Along with a few other parties (Gerakan, PPK and some others in Sabah and Sarawak) they all went under the banner of Barisan Nasional (BN for short).
UMNO have always been the ruling party, and have their methods, that are a little heavy handed and discriminatory against anybody not a Malay UMNO voter. They looked after their own to keep themselves in power.
On Saturday UMNO got their biggest shock ever. 5 of 12 Malaysian states voted in favour of "the opposition" - the States of Penang, Kedah, Kelantan (all northern), Perak and Selangor (which surrounds Kuala Lumpur) all voted away from the BN. UMNO faced heavy casualties, with several of its cabinet members and old boys getting the royal boot. The head of the MIC (a very unpopular man, responsible for millions of toll booths on highways) got voted out, as did the president of Gerakan.
Where BN stood unchallenged was in Sabah and Sarawak, and they got their seat not a problem, however UMNO didn't get voted in there, because they don't stand.
So the long and short of it is this - the BN are still the ruling allience, but they have always needed a 2 thirds majority to rule as they wished, and UMNO was always by far the biggest party. But the problem for UMNO is they didn't get enough votes. It wasn't just the chinese and the indians voting against them, but many of their hard-core malay constituencys said "No" and didn't vote them in.
It's been a massive week, because the thing is everybody in the whole country knows what the results mean. Even the very newspapers that last week were "UMNO UMNO UMNO BN BN BN" because they have no choice, have had the choke taken off them. The Star yesterday said "the days of UMNO dominance are over". Dominance? Last week it was almost divine right to rule. It's amazing. The MCA also got slashed to ribbons, by the mainly Chinese opposition party of the DAP (democratic action party), and the very upset Indian hindu community who has been the target of a lot of bad media recently told the MIC to roundly get lost.
People are now very interested to see what happens. Despite scaremongering that the economy is going to collapse, that investors in the KL stock exchange are grabbing their money and running to escape from this unstable government. This is a good amount of bullcrap, and the people know it, and they know that any attempts to take the publics decision away from them rests in the hands of a very weakened UMNO. The people really have spoken, and it's hurt the ones they spoke to.
The Prime Minister on election night (abdullah bedawi, otherwise known as Pak Lah) said, I paraphrase "well that's democracy isn't it".
A nation awaits what is to come.
In fact the former minister of Information (a well known gibbering bigot, by the name of Zainnudin Zainal, who made a total tit of himself of Al-Jazeera interview, click here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A1_GQ-K7P_w to see the interview, it is embarrassingly funny - this man was the INFORMATION MINISTER) who got well and truely voted out. Made some obscure comment yesterday about "young turks" in UMNO who I think he suggested were all in favour of trying to seize power on election day after parliament was dissolved, but for some reason they didn't and now we all hope that the slow and difficult process of genuine democracy (or at least as close as anybody ever gets) is underway.
So there we go, sorry to be all poltical, but it needs to be said, a dark path has led to a fork, and now lets hope Malaysians can guide themselves into the light. Let's hope.
Let us also hope on a footnote, that the tolerance period where the media has slackened, isn't just a bit to lure free thinkers out into the open, then promptly arrest them all when they decide to slam on a military + police rule, slamming us all in jail under the ISA, cos I may be a bit buggered innit.
love to all
footnote: as Malaysian are absolutely in love with acronyms, especially within politics, allow me to explain a few to you
UMNO - united malay nationalist organisation (BN)
MCA - Malaysian Chinese Association (BN)
MIC - Malaysian Indian Congress (BN)
DAP - Democration Action Party
PKR - Parti Keadilan Rakyat (peoples fairness party)
PAS - Parti Al Islam (Islam fundamentalists, very iffy, but party of "the oppostion", it's one of those unfortunate things that the DAP and PKR have been forced to side with a bunch of crazy nutters to make any form of sway in a political opposition alliance)
BN - Barisan Nasional. An allience of UMNO, MCA, MIC, SNAP, Gerakan and some others. The ruling party for 50 years.
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