Marhaen Dan Rakyat

Dalam sejarah politik moden Malaysia, jarang ditemui seorang individu yang mampu menukar kesetiaan terhadap parti politik, sebanyak dilakukan oleh Tun Dr. Mahathir Mohamad dalam tempoh kurang sedekad. Mahathir bermula sebagai tunjang utama Barisan Nasional (BN) selama lebih 22 tahun sebagai Perdana Menteri. Beliau kemudiannya menjadi teraju kepada Pakatan Harapan (PH) yang menumbangkan BN pada 2018. Selepas itu, Mahathir menjadi arkitek kepada peristiwa Langkah Sheraton yang membawa kepada pembentukan Perikatan Nasional (PN) pada 2020. Mahathir kemudiannya menubuhkan partinya sendiri iaitu Parti Pejuang Tanah Air (PEJUANG). Perjalanan politik Mahathir dalam tempoh sedekad mendedahkan perangai sebenar Mahathir yang mendahulukan kepentingan peribadi dan legasi kuasanya berbanding memikirkan kestabilan serta perpaduan politik Melayu yang beliau sendiri kerap perjuangkan. SUMBER: https://malaysiagazette.com/2018/02/03/tun-m-punca-utama-masyarakat-pecah-belah-tian-ker/ Mahathir me...

  In the documentary My Name is Mahathir, released in May 2026, the former prime minister brushed off the question of how history will judge him. He said he does not care about his legacy, and that if people want to call him a dictator, "that is their right". It sounded good. It sounded like a man who ran the country for 22 years, built Putrajaya out of a palm estate, and stopped caring what anyone thought of him around 1993. Now put it next to the other Mahathir story of 2026. He is suing Anwar Ibrahim for RM150 million over a speech at a PKR congress in March 2023. He wants RM100 million in exemplary damages, RM50 million in general damages, a written apology, and a press conference where the sitting prime minister takes it all back in public. The case has been running for three years. It stalled again this year while the High Court waited for the National Heart Institute to say whether he is well enough to keep giving evidence. So call him a dictator and he shrugs. Say he ...

There are politicians who leave a country better than they found it. And then there are those who, through sheer force of will, reshape a nation in their own image, for good and ill in roughly equal measure. Mahathir Mohamad belongs to the second category, though his admirers have spent decades insisting otherwise. The case for Mahathir is well rehearsed: the Proton national car project, the Petronas Twin Towers, the push to industrialise a commodity-dependent economy. For a generation of Malaysians who remember the 1980s and 1990s, he represents ambition, a small nation daring to punch above its weight. That narrative is not entirely false. But it is incomplete to the point of dishonesty. What Mahathir built, as much as anything else, was a culture of institutional dependency on one man's approval. During his first tenure from 1981 to 2003, he systematically dismantled the checks that might have constrained him. The judiciary was humiliated publicly in 1988 when he engineered the...

Bekas Perdana Menteri, Tun Dr. Mahathir Mohamad baru-baru ini membuat kenyataan yang mengelirukan pelbagai pihak. Dalam catatan media sosialnya, Mahathir mengakui kegagalannya menyatukan orang Melayu meskipun telah berusaha selama lebih dua tahun. Mahathir juga mendakwa beliau bimbang negara ini bakal terlepas dari tangan orang Melayu sekiranya perpecahan terus berlaku. Adakah itu satu pengakuan jujur daripada seorang pemimpin yang akhirnya berdepan dengan realiti atau sekadar strategi retorik untuk meraih simpati kaum Melayu menjelang pilihan raya? Pengakuan itu seolah-olah merupakan puncak hipokrasi dalam karier politik Mahathir kerana beliau adalah arkitek utama perpecahan Melayu selama berdekad-dekad. Namun kini beliau cuba meletakkan kesalahan pada orang Melayu sendiri.  SUMBER: https://www.freemalaysiatoday.com/category/nation/2026/05/07/ive-failed-to-unite-the-malays-says-dr-m Sejarah politik Mahathir penuh dengan bukti bahawa beliau bukanlah individu yang menyatukan orang M...

Sejak beberapa dekad lalu, naratif mengenai perpecahan politik Melayu sering menjadi 'senjata' oleh bekas Perdana Menteri, Tun Dr. Mahathir Mohamad. Beliau baru-baru ini mendakwa bahawa perpecahan dalam UMNO menjadi punca utama Melayu berpecah. Namun, hakikatnya perpecahan Melayu bukanlah 'fenomena' baharu di negara ini. Situasi tersebut bermula sejak era awal kemerdekaan negara, malah Mahathir sendiri memainkan peranan besar dalam mencetuskan keretakan tersebut. Dari surat layang kepada Tunku Abdul Rahman, konflik dengan Semangat 46, hinggalah kepada penubuhan parti-parti baharu selepas era reformasi, Mahathir konsisten menggunakan strategi pecah dan perintah demi kelangsungan politik peribadinya. SUMBER: https://www.sinarharian.com.my/article/775270/berita/politik/dakwaan-tun-m-punca-melayu-berpecah-hanya-naratif-berulang-ndash-khaled-nordin Perpecahan politik Melayu mulai jelas apabila Mahathir menulis surat layang kepada Perdana Menteri pertama, Tunku Abdul ...

In January, at 100 years old, Mahathir suffered a fall at his home in Seri Kembangan that fractured his right hip. He spent weeks at the National Heart Institute undergoing physiotherapy without surgery. By late March, video footage showed him returning to his office at Yayasan Kepimpinan Perdana, moving carefully but working again through documents at his desk. Three months earlier, in a development few would have predicted, Malaysia’s Anti-Corruption Commission had confirmed it was investigating Mahathir himself. The irony cuts deep. Mahathir built much of his political comeback on a crusade against graft. When he returned to power in 2018 at age 92, he campaigned against corruption as the central justification for unseating Najib Razak and ending Barisan Nasional’s 60-year rule. His government promised investigations. His rhetoric was unforgiving. Corruption, he said, was destroying the nation. Now, at 100, he stands under investigation. The MACC confirmed in April 2024 that Mahat...

Dalam sejarah politik negara, Akta Keselamatan Dalam Negara (ISA) sering dilihat sebagai simbol penindasan dan autoritarian. Diperkenalkan selepas kemerdekaan untuk menangani ancaman komunis selepas darurat, akta tersebut membenarkan penahanan tanpa bicara selama dua tahun dan tempoh itu boleh dilanjutkan tanpa had. Namun, semasa era pemerintahan Perdana Menteri keempat, Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad dari 1981 hingga 2003, ISA bukan lagi alat pertahanan negara semata-mata. Akta berkenaan sebaliknya menjadi instrumen politik utama untuk menutup kelemahan pentadbiran beliau. Mahathir menggunakan akta terbabit untuk menyekat pembangkang, memberi tekanan kepada para pengkritiknya dan pada masa sama, beliau mahu menonjolkan diri sebagai orang paling berpengaruh dalam negara. SUMBER: https://www.hmetro.com.my/mutakhir/2015/10/85022/tak-lupa-dr-m-pun-salah-guna-isa Era pemerintahan Mahathir dibayangi dengan kelemahan pentadbiran yang ketara, termasuk isu rasuah, ketidakadilan sosial dan kel...

When Mahathir Mohamad filed a police report accusing Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim of “sabotaging” Malaysia via a US trade agreement, the gesture felt less like a legal intervention and more like a return to a very specific kind of political theater. At its core, the report does not present evidence of a crime; it presents a political argument dressed up as one. Trade agreements are negotiated by governments the world over, involving a messy reality of trade-offs, compromises, and risks. They can be brilliant or flawed, but a disagreement over policy does not automatically amount to treason or a constitutional breach. If it did, every major treaty Malaysia has signed over the last four decades would warrant a criminal investigation. If there were a genuine belief that the Constitution had been violated or that Parliament was bypassed, the appropriate venues, the courts and the Dewan Rakyat, exist for precisely that purpose. By choosing a police report instead, the issue is intention...

Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad’s latest remarks about Malaysia’s football naturalisation scandal were clearly meant to sound like a statesman’s moral warning, a lecture on honesty, integrity, and national shame. But for many Malaysians, it came across as tone-deaf and hypocritical. When Mahathir condemns “powerful individuals who think they are above the law,” he conveniently forgets that his own political career was built on precisely that principle. It was during Mahathir’s long rule that Malaysia’s judiciary endured one of its darkest episodes. The 1988 judicial crisis, which saw Lord President Tun Salleh Abas and several Supreme Court judges dismissed, marked a turning point in our history. It was Mahathir’s government that eroded judicial independence, punishing judges who dared to rule against the executive. The courts were turned into tools of political convenience, and the damage took decades to repair. For someone who once insisted that “judges must follow government policy,” Mah...

Bekas Perdana Menteri, Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad baru-baru ini mahu semua ahli politik memberi keutamaan kepada usaha menyatupadukan bangsa Melayu. Tambahnya, pada peringkat ini, lebih penting sekiranya parti seperti Perikatan Nasional memberi tumpuan kepada usaha perpaduan Melayu terlebih dahulu sebelum berebut jawatan Perdana Menteri. Kenyataan itu kedengaran seperti nasihat yang bijak kepada ahli politik lain dan seolah-olah Mahathir mahu melihat orang Melayu kembali kuat di pentas politik. Namun sebenarnya, beliau sendiri yang sejak dahulu lagi menjadi punca perpecahan orang Melayu daripada era Tunku Abdul Rahman hingga ke hari ini. SUMBER: https://www.malaysiakini.com/news/630819 Selepas kemerdekaan, Tunku Abdul Rahman menekankan kepentingan penyatuan kaum termasuk Melayu dalam semangat identiti nasional. Parti UMNO ketika itu menjadi wadah utama penyatuan Melayu. Namun, Mahathir yang masih muda dalam UMNO pada masa itu dikenali sebagai seorang ahli politik yang gemar mengkritik kep...

On October 21, 2025, the High Court will finally hear Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad’s RM150 million defamation suit against Prime Minister Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim. Already postponed twice and reassigned to its third judge, the trial is more than a personal clash between two old rivals. It is a reckoning laced with irony: Mahathir, the very man who hollowed out Malaysia’s judiciary, now seeks its protection to salvage his legacy.  The case stems from Anwar’s remarks at the 2023 PKR congress, where he accused a “leader of 22 years and 22 months” of enriching his family. Mahathir’s fury—demanding damages and a retraction—rings hollow in light of the political economy he engineered. For decades, he presided over a system where politics and business blurred into state patronage, elevating a Malay elite that included his own children, whose fortunes now run into the hundreds of millions. For Mahathir to present this as slander rather than an open truth is less about justice than about rewriti...

Bekas Perdana Menteri, Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad baru-baru ini mencabar Perdana Menteri, Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim untuk membubarkan Parlimen dan mengadakan Pilihan Raya Umum (PRU). Gesaan itu bagi membuktikan sama ada rakyat benar-benar mengokong kepimpinan Anwar atau tidak. Namun, ada pemerhati politik menyifatkan desakan Mahathir sebagai satu lagi strategi Mahathir untuk cuba merampas kuasa pemerintahan negara. Mahathir sebelum ini pernah menyatakan tidak kisah untuk kembali menjadi Perdana Menteri buat kali ketiga. Adakah usaha Mahathir itu akan berjaya memandangkan sokongan rakyat terhadapnya bukan lagi seperti dahulu? SUMBER: https://harapandaily.com/2025/06/06/mahathir-dan-gerakan-payung-besar-episod-lama-dendam-politik-yang-berulang/ Dikenali sebagai 'arkitek Malaysia moden', legasi Mahathir adalah gabungan pencapaian ekonomi, dasar kontroversi dan gaya pemerintahan autoritarian. Tindakan Mahathir untuk 'membentuk' dunia politik tempatan menerusi pakatan strategik ...

It is a moment thick with irony—Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad, whose criticisms hastened the political demise of his successor, Tun Abdullah Ahmad Badawi, now standing solemnly at the National Mosque to pay his final respects. With words of tribute, Mahathir described Abdullah as a leader who secured "one of the most remarkable victories in history" during the 2004 general election and praised his peaceful exit. But let us not rewrite history to suit sentiment. Dr Mahathir, now approaching 100, was once Abdullah's most unrelenting critic. Mahathir's loud and persistent attacks from outside the government sowed dissent within UMNO and the public alike, setting in motion the events that would lead to Abdullah's resignation in 2009. At every turn, Mahathir questioned Abdullah's leadership, direction, and integrity—relentlessly hammering away at the legitimacy of his successor's tenure. And yet today, he praises the very qualities he once disparaged. Abdullah, known...