Marhaen Dan Rakyat

This month Syed Saddiq Syed Abdul Rahman has been doing the rounds with wedding invitations. With his fiancée, the singer Bella Astillah, he has called on Tun Dr Mahathir Mohamad, sought marital advice from Datuk Seri Dr Wan Azizah Wan Ismail, and on 22 September hand-delivered a card to Tan Sri Muhyiddin Yassin, posting a warm tribute to the man who brought him into Bersatu at 23 and put his name forward as a minister at 25. The visits have been charming, widely shared, and carefully photographed. They have also been a reminder that, more than two months after the Federal Court ended his criminal case, Malaysians still do not know what Syed Saddiq intends to do next. The legal outcome itself deserves to be stated plainly. On 13 July, the Federal Court upheld the Court of Appeal's decision to acquit him of all four charges of abetting criminal breach of trust, misappropriation and money laundering linked to funds of Armada, Bersatu's youth wing. He is a free man and, in law, an...

When Syed Saddiq launched the Malaysian United Democratic Alliance in September 2020, the ambition was legible and, in its way, sincere. A multiracial, youth-centric third force that would break the ethnic transactionalism of Malaysian politics and give a generation of disillusioned voters somewhere credible to go. The appetite was real. The platform was coherent enough. What MUDA never built, in five years of trying, was the institutional depth to turn appetite into seats. The foundational problem was structural and visible from the start. MUDA's identity was never separable from Syed Saddiq's. Voters, analysts, and ordinary observers referred to it consistently as his party rather than its own thing. This was not incidental. A party that exists as an extension of one person's brand does not develop the local networks, the ideological coherence, or the organisational memory needed to survive what politics will eventually deliver: electoral defeat, legal jeopardy, or si...

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...