Malaysia’s former Prime Minister Muhyiddin Yassin has been charged with sedition, after allegedly criticizing the country’s previous king in an election campaign speech earlier this month.
Muhyiddin, who led Malaysia from March 2020 to August 2021, appeared yesterday in a court in Gua Musang, in the northeastern state of Kelantan, where he pleaded not guilty. The charge, brought under the colonial-era Sedition Act, carries a fine of up to 5,000 ringgit ($1,150), a prison term of up to three years, or both.
The sedition charge relates to a by-election campaign event in Gua Musang on August 15, when, according to a Nikkei Asia report, Muhyiddin questioned why then-King, Sultan Abdullah of Pahang, did not invite him to form a government after the general election in 2022, despite him securing the support of a majority of the 222-seat parliament. The king eventually chose Anwar Ibrahim to become prime minister.
“I had the support of 115 MPs, but I was not called to form the government,” he reportedly said, adding, “Who was the agong (king) at that time?” Sultan Abdullah, who is from the central state of Pahang, was replaced in January by Sultan Ibrahim Sultan Iskandar of Johor.
The 77-year-old’s remarks prompted immediate public outrage and condemnation, including from within the Perikatan Nasional opposition coalition, of which Muhyiddin is the chair.
Such was the backlash that Muhyiddin was forced to issue a statement on August 19 defending his comments. He claimed that his speech was a “factual statement that was not intended to insult the monarchy or contain any seditious tendency.”
The new sedition charge is the least of Muhyiddin’s legal troubles; in March 2023, just four months after the general election, he was also charged with abuse of power charges related to Jana Wibawa, an economic stimulus program for ethnic Malay contractors that was instituted during the COVID-19 pandemic. Prosecutors claim that Muhyiddin accepted 232.5 million ringgit ($51.4 million) in bribes for his party Bersatu.
While the Malaysian High Court in August 2023 acquitted Muhyiddin of the abuse of power charges, describing them as “vague, flawed and unfounded,” they were reinstated on appeal in February of this year. He also faces two counts of money laundering in connection with the Jana Wibawa program.
While Anwar’s administration said that it was merely fulfilling the PM’s longstanding promise to tackle corruption, the prime minister’s Malay nationalist opponents have inevitably depicted the charges as a politically motivated witch hunt. In the current polarized environment, it is perhaps inevitable that the sedition charge will be viewed by Muhyiddin partisans in much the same way.
The case is also likely to revive the heated debate about the Malaysian government’s use of colonial-era laws to prevent comments about the “3Rs” – race, religion, and royalty – which it claims are necessary to maintain social harmony. The fact that the use of these laws has persisted under Anwar, whose coalition championed free speech and promised to repeal key repressive British-era laws while in opposition, has added a further twist.
These debates came to a head in July 2023, when prosecutors filed sedition charges against Muhammad Sanusi Md Nor, the caretaker chief minister of Kedah State, and a prominent member of the resurgent Malaysian Islamist Party (PAS). Like Muhyiddin, he was charged with insulting the country’s sultans in a political speech, though he was also a known peddler of Malay nationalist conspiracy theories and comments denigrating the country’s Indian and Chinese communities.
The case prompted a disagreement between those who believe that Anwar’s administration was justified in using colonial-era laws to prevent the spread of right-wing racial rhetoric and disinformation, and those who believe that this could backfire politically, feeding the grievances of right-wing Malay ethnonationalism.