Why changing the government was never going to be enough

A recent critique in Aliran argues that the Madani government is “ticking boxes but missing the point”, urging a shift from transactional competence to transformational courage.

While compelling, such critiques often reveal a deeper problem in Malaysia’s progressive discourse: the tendency to pose structurally valid questions while putting forward politically ungrounded expectations.

What is ‘expectational politics’? It is the belief that electoral turnover must immediately produce systemic transformation – and that if it does not, the government is either insincere or illegitimate.

While normatively attractive, this framing risks misreading Malaysia’s political economy and undermining the very reform space it seeks to expand.

Structural constraints

Malaysia’s political economy reflects many dynamics highlighted in world‑systems analysis, developed by Immanuel Wallerstein (The Modern World-System, Academic Press, 1974). This approach builds on but moves beyond classic dependency theory.

As a semi-peripheral economy, the Malaysia remains structurally embedded in global value chains dominated by foreign capital, technological dependence and constrained fiscal sovereignty.

Domestically, this is reinforced by ethnopolitical clientelism and ethnocapitalist accumulation – dynamics extensively analysed by Jomo Kwame Sundaram [The New Economic Policy and Interethnic Relations in Malaysia, UNRISD, 2004] and Edmund Terence Gomez.

Meredith Weiss’s body of work further shows that political legitimacy here is mediated not only through elections but also through distributional bargains along ethnic and class lines.

Under such conditions, structural transformation is not simply a matter of political will. It is conditioned by institutional inertia, coalition fragility and Malaysia’s global economic positioning.

Misplaced search for an ‘architect’

The call for an “architect” to rebuild Malaysia’s “rotten system” is rhetorically powerful, but it has its flaws.

Political transformation is rarely the product of a single person’s agency, or even a single election cycle. As our own history shows, leaders are products of long struggle. In this context, Anwar Ibrahim is best understood as a transitional figure, emerging from decades of reformist contestation.

Expecting him – operating within a fragmented electoral mandate and an ethnically polarised landscape – to deliver not just quick fixes but a systemic overhaul is an enormous ask.

When expectations destabilise reform

Malaysia’s present configuration is structurally delicate: fragmented voter alignments, persistent ethnoreligious cleavages and a coalition without dominant majority support.

Under such conditions, reform necessarily takes incremental and negotiated forms. Yet within segments of progressive discourse, incrementalism is often equated with failure.

This creates a paradox: the expanded democratic space gets used to delegitimise the very coalition that enabled it.

In a fast-moving digital media environment, such delegitimisation can erode fragile political legitimacy, weaken reformist coalitions and inadvertently strengthen reactionary alternatives.

Technocracy and its limits

Some critics attribute Malaysia’s reform deficit to incomplete adherence to prescriptions by institutions such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). This view, however, needs some qualification.

While governance reforms and fiscal restructuring are necessary, uncritical adoption of liberalisation and austerity measures may worsen inequality, deepen financialisation and reinforce external dependency [see Rodrik, One Economics, Many Recipes, Princeton University Press, 2007].

The challenge, therefore, is not compliance but selective adaptation within structural constraints.

Progressive critique remains indispensable. Without it, reform inertia sets in, elite accommodation deepens and transformation is indefinitely deferred.

But critique that ignores structural realities risks becoming performative rather than strategic. When all compromise is framed as betrayal, critique ceases to be a corrective mechanism and becomes a destabilising force instead.

Towards political maturity

Malaysia knows what its problems are. What it lacks is a political discourse capable of aligning expectations with structural realities while sustaining reform momentum.

To demand immediate transformation – or none at all – is to risk cyclical disillusionment and regression.

The “Madani” (trustworthy) government should be evaluated not solely on outcomes achieved, but on whether it has expanded the conditions for deeper structural change.

The “architect” Malaysia awaits will not emerge in a single political moment. If that figure ever emerges, he or she will be the product of sustained struggle, institutional evolution and an enduring process of political learning.

Until then, the task before us remains this: to expand the reform space without collapsing it under the weight of its own expectations.

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