Malaysia opposition faces challenging times

As she gets into her vehicle, Nurul Izzah, daughter of Malaysia's jailed opposition leader, apologises for its state.

A bulging plastic bag is taking up leg room, while a box of tissues and plastic water bottle are wedged into the crack in the rear seat. "Kids, they're quite rowdy," she explains, as the people carrier moves off through Kuala Lumpur's busy evening traffic.

But the state of Ms Nural's car is nothing compared to that of Malaysia, which for the past month has been on edge as opposing political forces have collided, with toxic results.

Anwar Ibrahim, Ms Nurul's father, was consigned to political oblivion in February, receiving a five-year jail sentence after a court overturned his appeal against a sodomy conviction following a decades-long saga.

The 67-year-old politician was seen as a future prime minister by his supporters but as a political nuisance by many in the country's ruling United Malays National Organisation.

Only weeks later Ms Nurul, a single mother of two, was arrested briefly on suspicion of sedition. Hours earlier the 34-year-old, an MP in her father's Keadilan (Justice) party since 2008, made a speech in parliament that used material from Mr Anwar that was critical of the judicial process.

Ms Nurul is popular among Malaysian youth at a time when the voting population is swelling with the ranks of younger people entering the electorate for the first time.

She is sometimes talked about as a future opposition leader in a country which, while third in population size after Indonesia and Thailand, is a moderate Muslim anchor in Southeast Asia.

Yet the authorities' increasing use of the country's sedition act, which dates back to British colonial times, is alarming political observers and many Malaysians.

Ms Nurul and fellow opponents of the government believe sedition is being used as a tool to weaken the opposition, in a widening dragnet that has so far seen about 100 politicians and journalists detained.

Ms Nurul says she saw her father two days earlier, for 45 minutes. He is allowed only one such visit a month.

"He's lost weight, about 3kg over the past month," she says. "Prison food, you get cereals three times a week."

The family is accustomed to the situation; Mr Anwar spent six years in jail until 2004 in an earlier sodomy case.

But the opposition's resilience is being tested as more divisive politics raises fears over the direction of the country of 30m, which has long been seen abroad as a largely successful multi-ethnic experiment.

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Yet Chinese Malaysians and many urban Malays are increasingly nervous about conservative reflexes within Umno, which was alarmed at the success at the last general election in 2013 of Mr Anwar's three-party Pakatan Rakyat (People's Alliance) coalition.

Some within Umno are agitating for the prime minister, Najib Razak, a technocratic moderate, to be removed because he is not seen as sufficiently hardline in safeguarding the interests of majority Malays, politicians say.

While Pakatan won the popular vote, it did not gain a majority of parliamentary seats because of anomalies in the way constituency boundaries are drawn.

"From the last general elections, it's quite clear that Pakatan is decisively the alternative to the ruling party, in terms of popular votes garnered, so it made us easily the target of the government of the day," says Ms Nurul.

"And Najib, with his many internal problems, would see it fitting to target the opposition coalition. So I always maintain that the attack and the imprisonment of the opposition leader is only the first step."

Yet Pakatan itself has been thrown into turmoil. Not only has it lost its leader, but the coalition's largely ethnic Chinese grouping, the Democratic Action party, is at loggerheads with its Islamist constituent over the introduction of hudud, a strict form of sharia law, in the northern state of Kelantan.

The Parti Islam Se-Malaysia (PAS) introduced hudud there but in a surprise development won the support of Umno's Kelantan branch for the move. That has sparked a war of words between the DAP and the PAS, handing a political gift to Umno in the process.

Asked how she would describe the state of the opposition, Ms Nurul says it is an extremely challenging time. "It's a make or break moment. But we should rise above [it] and understand what's at stake here."

One thing at stake is the future of Malaysia's multi-ethnic balance, amid an apparent attempt by Umno to co-opt the Islamist agenda to bolster support among Malays, who are constitutionally required to be Muslim.

Ms Nurul says she thinks Malaysia is becoming Islamicised, under the guise of a Malay agenda. "But it's not a process rooted in Islamic traditions, it's an exercise that's rooted in Umno traditions. Because in this country, you have religious authority defining what a Muslim should be, what Islam is. So it's very sad, and it's very worrying."

While she will not be drawn on her own ambitions, she says the opposition needs to find a way to regroup to fight the next election, which must be called by 2018.

"You could have anyone to be a figurehead but if you keep bickering with one another and issuing statements that hurt each other, it's going to be tough," she says. "We have to stick to decisions made as a coalition. So I think that process is far more important than who leads."

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