Stuck at the Stop Sign

Two seemingly unrelated events symbolize how Malaysia is starting a new chapter in its history.

Malaysian tycoon Ananda Krishnan, 86, recently passed away. As the Associated Press explained, his shares in the media company Astro, oil services deliverer Bumi Armada, telecommunications company Maxis, and satellite company Measat were estimated to be worth more than $5 billion. A close ally of former pro-business Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad, he came up with the idea of the Petronas Twin Towers, an 88-story monument to the South Asian country’s economic and geopolitical heft.

At the same time, floods have claimed at least three lives and displaced more than 90,000 people, reported Reuters, quoting current Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim. The high waters stemmed from torrential rain during the already flood-prone monsoon season that runs from October to March, though the Malaysian news website Aliran warned that climate change was to blame, too.

“To dismiss the deluge as mere inter-monsoon changes is foolish and will only wreak more damage to properties, affect routines, and cost the government more in wasted public money,” wrote the outlet.

These events show how Malaysia, which has enjoyed stellar economic growth in recent years that is credited to the country’s previous generation of leaders, is facing tough, new challenges.

Malaysia’s gross domestic product has been growing at five percent annually due to conservative economic policies – price controls and strong central bankers, for example – while granting incentives to foreign investors. As Bloomberg noted, Anwar has attracted Alphabet, Amazon, and Microsoft to a tech hub, opened the stock market to outsiders, and encouraged women in the Muslim-majority country – albeit with significant Buddhist, Christian, and Hindu minority communities – to join the workforce, too.

Anwar has sought to steer more of that economic growth to green projects to combat climate change, as his Ministry of Natural Resources and Environmental Sustainability said in a statement.

Meanwhile, the country faces other thorny problems in the form of pushback against its conservative social-behavioral policies. Malaysia, for example, has criminalized homosexual activity under civil and Islamic law, wrote Al Jazeera. In an interesting recent case, a court ordered the government to return rainbow-themed watches that officials had seized on the suspicion that they were promoting the LGBTQ agenda because they lacked a warrant, not because seizing pride paraphernalia was questionable. The government complied.

Anwar has also adopted the most strident position against Israel’s devastating prosecution of the war against Hamas in the Gaza Strip, alienated the US, and curtailed his flexibility in remaining friends with both the US and China, World Politics Review argued.

Worse, his foreign policy is not helping the country’s domestic priorities.

“Anwar’s foreign policy statements may well exacerbate his domestic policy challenges in the long term by hampering his efforts to court US and Western investors,” WPR wrote, adding that this was “Complicating matters, even though Anwar has turned a blind eye to China’s increasing assertiveness in Malaysia’s territorial waters, that has not translated into enough of a corresponding economic benefit.”