Profile of Malaysian PM Mahathir Mohamad
Profile of Malaysian PM Mahathir
(Reuters) – Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad has submitted his resignation to the king, two sources with direct knowledge of the matter told Reuters on Monday (February 24), amid talks of forming a new coalition to govern the country.
Mahathir, 94, assumed office in May 2018 for his second stint as prime minister. A spokesman from the prime minister’s office declined to comment, saying only that a statement will be issued soon.
The sources declined to be named as they were not authorized to talk to the media.
Mahathir, currently the world’s oldest prime minister, came back to power 15 years after he left politics. A barefoot boy in rural Malaysia who sold balloons to make money and studied as a doctor, Mahathir emerged as one of the developing world’s most recognisable figures.
He was a master at playing to the ethnic Malay majority. His 1970 political thesis, The Malay Dilemma, argued that Malays, the nation’s rightful owners, were being eclipsed economically by ethnic Chinese.
In the 1980s, many opposition and civil society leaders were jailed without trial, and newspapers critical of Mahathir’s administration were shut down. Many remember the accusations against him of cronyism, undermining the judiciary and suppressing dissent.
In the West, he is also remembered for anti-Semitic remarks and for pursuing a pugnacious style of diplomacy that irritated his biggest trading partner, the United States, and led to a decade-long falling out with Australia. He accused the West of hypocrisy in preaching to poorer nations on issues like human rights, the environment and trade.
He liked to mix with leaders shunned by the West, such as Fidel Castro and Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe. He also invited military-run Myanmar into Southeast Asia’s diplomatic club and spent years squabbling with his old rival in neighbouring Singapore, Lee Kuan Yew.
His legacy included the soaring 88-storey twin towers in Kuala Lumpur, a lavish new administrative capital, a cavernous airport, a tangle of six-lane expressways and a large but troubled car industry.
Mahathir’s feud with former deputy Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim, who he sacked in 1998 and jailed the following year on charges of corruption and sodomy, has shaped the country’s political landscape over the past two decades.
Mahathir weathered a storm of political protest and economic turmoil but, ultimately, he survived and chose the timing of his own departure: in late 2003, he handed power to a mild-mannered successor, former foreign minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi.
Mahathir turned on Najib in 2015 after news broke of a multi-billion-dollar scandal involving state fund 1Malaysia Development Berhad (1MDB), which faces money-laundering probes in at least six countries.
In 2018, Mahathir joined a fractured opposition alliance led by his old foes and was elected to become the prime minister candidate, marking the first time the ruling party has been toppled in six decades.
