Making (internet) space for the ‘opposition playground’ in Malaysia

Abstract

Malaysia bucked the trend of regime resilience in Southeast Asia when the ruling coalition was voted out for the first time in 2018. For six decades, the coalition had clung on to power through a variety of control mechanisms: policy, legislation and ownership, leading scholars to call Malaysia a ‘hybrid regime’, seemingly democratic utilising authoritarian frameworks. The early cracks in the information environment emerged in the late 1990s and by 2008, the traditional opposition parties began making electoral gains. This timeline matched the rise of the mainstreaming of internet technologies. This use of the internet, particularly by activists, brought together in one space anti-incumbent political sentiment: ‘the opposition playground’. The smooth transition of powers that has occurred since 2018 shows that, put together, a variety of bold and creative use of internet technologies by activists can cause a rupture in the authoritarian hold of governments, and slow down democratic backsliding.

In 2018, the incumbent Barisan Nasional (National Front, or BN) coalition which had governed Malaysia for over 60 years ¹ was voted out at the 14th General Election (GE14). This came following a decade of electoral decline at the polls starting with the 2008 elections, after which scholars credited the role of internet and new media technologies in denying BN its two-thirds majority in Parliament for the first time since the 1969 elections (Suffian, 2008). Since then, the impact of digital platforms in Malaysian politics has been significant, leading to the 2013 elections being dubbed the ‘social media elections’ (Mohd Azizuddin, 2014) and GE14 the ‘WhatsApp election’ (Johns, 2020).

Yet, BN's loss in 2018 was largely unexpected considering the then-government's strong semi-authoritarian reputation (Chin and Welsh, 2018), leading scholars like Case (2019: 5) to argue that by then, Malaysia ‘had exceeded this regime type's already long-life expectancy by more than two decades’. What's more, this regime's resilience was also in line with trends in the Southeast Asian region, where the potency of the authoritarian playbook has been sustained despite the promised emancipatory qualities of internet technologies (Bünte, 2020). In Malaysia, this decline and eventual defeat came despite decades of control of legacy media and (later) the internet, through policy and legislation as well as significant investments by the bigger parties in BN to mobilise cybertroopers – that is, state-linked agents manipulating online political communication practices (Cheong, 2019).

Against this local and regional landscape, Malaysia showed that it is possible to usher in a new era of peaceful transitions of power; there have been two such transitions since 2018, fulfilling the ‘two-turnover’ rule for democratic consolidation (Ong, 2023). The emergence and subsequent heavy adoption of internet technologies since the mid-1990s – from websites to blogs, and social media platforms to chat apps – no doubt played a major role, particularly in spreading awareness, opening up spaces for public discourse and mobilisations of social movements, not dissimilar to global trends from the past couple of decades (Lim, 2025; Postill, 2014). However, it was more than just internet affordances that made the difference; I argue that two significant factors in the country's history were key – first, a no-censorship policy in the 1990s to attract investors, and secondly, the creative ways that activist took advantage of that policy to open up space for discourse online. Together, these two factors have created a lasting online environment prime for challenging regime resilience.

Networks of activists get creative

In the mid-1990s, the Malaysian government's banking on the knowledge economy to propel the country towards developed status – as part of then-Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad's Vision 2020 – laid the foundation for the opening up of the digital public sphere, even if only for a little bit. Alongside its heavy investment in telecommunication infrastructure and encouraging adoption of the internet in both urban and rural parts of the country, the government had also developed the Multimedia Super Corridor (MSC) modelled after Silicon Valley to lure foreign investors (Hachigian, 2002). To make the MSC seem attractive, a Bill of Guarantees was announced; one was a guarantee of no internet censorship, seen as a departure from Mahathir's control of the cultural and political spheres (Bunnell, 2002).

Activists, including opposition politicians, who have for decades been muzzled by the predominantly government-owned and controlled media ecosystem, were quick to take advantage of this seeming liberalisation, at least perceivably, with little consequences. By 1999, two journalists with deep roots in activism, Steven Gan and Premesh Chandran, launched Malaysiakini, an online website that became (and continues to be) the main alternative to the mainstream media as a source of news for Malaysians (Steele, 2009). Around the same time, activist journalists like Sabri Zain took to the internet to publish (boldly in his own name) political commentary as the Reformasi Diaries, named after the reform movement that had grown out of a political crisis where Mahathir had ousted his Deputy Prime Minister (Khoo, 2016).

In the early noughties during the era of blogging, activists speaking up against the government became popular opinion leaders, a number of whom later ran in elections successfully (Hah, 2016). In 2005, civil society groups joined five then-opposition parties to form the Coalition for Clean and Fair Elections (or Bersih) to take on the government – in 2011, it was relaunched as Bersih 2.0 as a non-partisan movement. For over a decade from its first rally in 2007, Bersih would use social media (and chat apps) to coordinate numerous rallies both in Malaysia and abroad, mobilising hundreds of thousands of citizens to take to the streets and to their tweets (Lim, 2017). That first Bersih rally followed the success of the Hindu Rights Action Force (HINDRAF) rally, which scholars have noted was born from the ‘reshaping (of) minority Malaysian Indian's public opinion’ born out of ethnic-Indian-based ‘cyber-communities’ (Govindasamy and Ganesan, 2024: 165).

Like the bloggers before them, other activists took to social media platforms to build sustained movements and cement their place in political discourse. The likes of graphic artist and activist Fahmi Reza created his own template for calling out politicians by drawing their faces as clowns – the most documented of which was the portrait of BN's last Prime Minister before its electoral loss, Najib Razak, who is currently serving time for corruption. Other activists like Hishamuddin Rais formed informal coalitions like Asalkan Bukan UMNO (Anyone But UMNO, or ABU), calling voters to vote for anyone but the largest party in BN.

Indeed, it was through the opening up of this sliver of uncensored media space through the MSC Bill of Guarantees, and the tenacity of activists to occupy and expand that space, that made the difference. And while the no censorship promise didn’t last for many years – and even then, the government still found ways to clamp down on dissent using a slew of archaic laws that remained in place (George, 2005) – the dam where plurality of political discourse in Malaysia was concerned had broken. News outlets like Malaysiakini held steadfast amid intimidation of their journalists, including criminal investigations and charges, and inspired what I call ‘internet-led political journalism’, which mirrored the forms of watchdog journalism more commonly found in the traditional liberal democracies, heralding a new (digital) media ecosystem in the country (Cheong, 2021). This new ecosystem led to the formation of the internet as the ‘opposition playground’, where activists, then-opposition politicians, and everyday citizens united in their weariness of decades of incumbency politics to come together to seed and spread anti-government sentiments (Cheong, 2020).

It is the sustaining of this ‘opposition playground’ that has contributed to the relative stability of politics and democratic practice in Malaysia, even as the country grappled over the past few years with what this might look like (Weiss, 2025). In the first term alone following the GE14 electoral victory, the country had three different Prime Ministers leading different administrations as a result of shifting coalitions of political parties. In 2022 at GE15, the fourth Prime Minister since 2018 came to power, and now leads a ‘Unity Government’ that was formed in response to the first hung Parliament in the nation's history (Tan, 2024). Despite all these changes in leadership, including some of whom promised reformist policies, most of the archaic laws that led to decades of the chilling effect has endured, and has even been toughened up since (Govindasamy and Ganesan, 2024: 165; Johns and Cheong, 2019). Yet, it is still possible to hold those in power to account.

An opposition playground to challenge regime resilience

The Malaysian case can well serve as an example for countries where regime resilience remains tough to penetrate. It can also offer useful lessons for traditionally liberal democracies currently experiencing significant democratic decline and the rise of authoritarianism. The key here is not just the emergence and adoption of internet technologies; it is the role of activists in using said technologies in bold and creative ways, built for longevity. It is in Malaysiakini leading the way in the creation of a sustainable model for new forms of journalism practices; in HINDRAF, Bersih and ABU's building of online communities within and across demographic intersections; and in activists like Reza's weaponising of internet popular culture to sear visual images taking power to task in the minds of citizens.

More so than relying on politicians and political parties (opposition, or otherwise), most of whom have over the past few years found themselves sleeping in the proverbial bed with former political nemeses making strange bedfellows in the pursuit of retaining or usurping power, the Malaysian case shows how activists building strong, foundational structures online – to make up the ‘opposition playground’ – can keep power in check and stand the test of time, or at the very least, slow down democratic backsliding.