COMMENT | Before the contest begins - some early thoughts

COMMENT | This coming Malaysian general election will be historic.

It will surely be the last “political hurrah” for Dr Mahathir Mohamad, for Tengku Razaleigh Hamzah (whether he is chosen to run again in Gua Musang or not), possibly for Muhyiddin Yassin, and also for Anwar Ibrahim, if once again he fails to deliver for his PKR.

And, speaking personally, this will certainly be my last Malaysian election as an “on-the-ground” bystander-observer - the last in a sequence going back to various by-elections in the late 1960s and then the fateful general elections of 1969.

And these elections will be like no other that we have seen.

Those leading national figures of the last half-century may have reached the end of their political roads. But apart from that, nothing much else is at this stage at all clear. And that means that GE15 will be not only historic but also unprecedented.

What is unusual about the election to be held some three weeks from now is that the result is genuinely uncertain and almost unfathomable - in a way that earlier elections have not been. GE15 will be unlike GE14, and also unlike those that preceded it.

The outlook is unclear, at the superficial level, because of the bewildering array of parties and party-alliances that are now offering themselves to the people.

But how has the national political situation come to this?...