Mahathir's Blueprint

Bersatu did not fracture by accident. The party that Mahathir Mohamad co-founded in 2016, built around the promise of a new Malay political vehicle, has spent the opening months of 2026 consuming itself: its leaders purged, its parliamentary bloc split, its chairman gone, and its position in Perikatan Nasional weakened to the point where PAS has stepped in to assume the coalition's leadership. The proximate cause was the bitter feud between Muhyiddin Yassin and his own deputy, Hamzah Zainudin. But the architecture of the collapse, the backroom manoeuvring, the competing loyalty claims, the toxic mixture of personal ambition and Malay unity rhetoric, bears the unmistakable hallmark of the man who built the party in the first place.

Mahathir has not been a Bersatu member for years. He was expelled in 2020, formed Pejuang, lost everything at GE15, and has spent the time since in the role he has always performed best: the elder statesman with opinions and no accountability for the consequences. But his fingerprints are on the 2026 crisis in a manner too specific to ignore. When Hamzah was sacked from Bersatu on February 13, he offered an explanation for the conduct that got him expelled: that his meetings with UMNO president Ahmad Zahid Hamidi were conducted under a direct mandate from Mahathir, as part of the former prime minister's "big umbrella" initiative to reunite Malay leaders under one political roof. Bersatu disputed this, saying no such mandate was ever formally registered with the party's Supreme Council. But the claim itself tells you something. When a senior leader needs to invoke Mahathir's name to justify political conduct that his own party regards as sabotage, it means Mahathir remains a live wire inside opposition politics, not a retired patriarch but an active source of competing instructions, real or claimed.

This is what a decade of Mahathir's political style leaves behind. Not institutions. Not stable coalitions. Not a clear line of succession or an agreed framework for how power should move. What it leaves is a culture in which personal mandates override party mandates, in which informal authority trumps formal structure, and in which loyalty is calibrated not to the coalition but to the individual. Bersatu did not invent this culture. It inherited it from the man who shaped its founding logic.

The February purge was the visible expression of a problem that had been building inside the party for longer. Hamzah and 18 other allied MPs were sacked at the height of his feud with Muhyiddin, fundamentally shifting the power dynamics within the opposition coalition. Analysts noted that Hamzah's removal would create unease in PAS about Bersatu and Muhyiddin himself, since PAS was evidently close to Hamzah. Muhyiddin subsequently stepped down as PN chairman, with PAS declaring its readiness to lead the coalition in his place. In the space of weeks, Bersatu went from being PN's anchor party to being its most destabilising element, with a rival Bersatu faction aligning with PAS against the party's own president.

The irony is not subtle. Mahathir founded Bersatu as a corrective to UMNO's internal rot: the factionalism, the patronage politics, the leaders who confused the party's interests with their own. A decade later, the party he founded is exhibiting the same pathologies, down to the sacked deputy threatening to form a new vehicle, the social media wars between competing factions, and the party president vowing to block his former number two from re-entering the coalition. Muhyiddin declared he no longer trusted Hamzah, saying that when confidence in someone was lost because of dishonesty, that was a serious matter requiring the party to be protected. These are the words of a man who sounds, with some frequency, like the man who once said them about him.

You cannot found a party on the model of your own authority and expect it to develop any other kind. Bersatu was always a vehicle organised around Mahathir's charisma and strategic utility, not around ideology or institutional depth. When he left, what remained was the shell of a Malay-first party with no agreed principle of internal governance beyond whoever currently held the presidency. The Muhyiddin-Hamzah split is what happens when that shell is tested.

Mahathir, predictably, has positioned himself outside and above the wreckage. That positioning is itself the lesson. He has spent his post-premiership years claiming to be the conscience of Malay politics while advancing initiatives, like the big umbrella, that his allies then deploy inside parties he no longer controls, producing consequences he does not have to answer for. It is a remarkably efficient arrangement. The disruption is outsourced. The credibility, such as it remains, stays with him.

Bersatu may yet survive in some form. Malaysian politics has a tolerance for parties that should, by any structural logic, have ceased to exist. But what it cannot survive, what no Malaysian coalition has yet managed to survive, is being built on the Mahathir template: authority without accountability, unity rhetoric without institutional trust, and the perpetual suggestion that the next arrangement, the next umbrella, the next coalition, will be the one that finally holds.