Muhyiddin Yassin, Najib’s deputy as both Malaysia’s Deputy Prime Minister and UMNO Deputy President, expressed confidence that UMNO’s new electoral system would accomplish its aims of eliminating money politics and its grassroots, insisting that the historic party elections had truly proved that UMNO was ‘inclusive, democratic and open’.

While it is true that UMNO is finally moving in the direction of transformation, it is overly optimistic to conclude that the winds of change affecting UMNO will irreversibly democratise the nation’s ruling party.

After all, the present seemingly pro-change environment came about only after the abrupt realisation that an UMNO-led coalition might simply be obliterated in the coming general elections if it continued to resist metamorphoses intended to broaden the government’s image and appeal. It took the two general elections of 2008 and 2013 to jolt UMNO diehards out of their slumber, driven by the unassailable fact of increasingly slimmer majorities commanded by UMNO-led coalitions.

In the process of mental transformation and later structural shake-ups experienced by UMNO members, one unintended casualty was Abdullah Ahmad Badawi, whose tenure as prime minister and UMNO president was brutally cut short by their apparent impatience at the pace of change. But the fact that transmutation was effected at the hands of first Abdullah and then Najib, both long-serving members of UMNO’s ancien regime, underlines the irony behind its present transformation agenda. UMNO was founded in 1946 as a traditional grouping of Malay associations coalescing to preserve cherished institutions symbolising Malay hegemony, and has remained essentially conservative in many respects.

The indefatigable Mahathir Mohamad, as the uncompromising numero uno for 22 years (1981–2003), bulldozed through changes; many, however, preserved power in the hands of a carefully selected loyal coterie of politicians. Falling out of favour with Mahathir would consign one to the political wilderness regardless of one’s standing in party and society, as Abdullah Ahmad Badawi found out in 1987–1991, Tengku Razaleigh Hamzah discovered in 1987–1996 and Anwar Ibrahim has gone through, UMNO-wise, since 1998.

Paramount in Mahathir’s scheme was always politics, which was essentially geared towards maintaining vegetative patterns and structures designed to keep favoured dogmas and personalities in positions of respect and authority. When Mahathir’s pre-UMNO elections calls for change fell on deaf ears (cynically interpreted by many quarters as pleas to back the vice-presidential bid of his son Mukhriz Mahathir) he was in fact falling victim to his own game of power preservation, bolstered by a culture of fear of whosoever is in power plus his cronies. Paradoxically, Mukhriz’s defeat was testament to the triumph of Mahathirism with all its attendant conservative credentials. To add insult to injury, the person whom Mukhriz failed to unseat as UMNO vice-president, Defence Minister Hishamuddin Hussein, was son of Hussein Onn, UMNO’s third president whose unexpected resignation in 1981 Mahathir was speculated to have had a hand in. In passing, it may be pondered that Hussein Onn’s father, Onn Jaafar, left UMNO in 1951 after leading the party for five years, after bravely mulling the idea of opening up UMNO’s membership to non-Malays, hence running afoul of UMNO’s conservative base.

That UMNO in 2013 remains antithetical to reform is not difficult for the perspicacious observer to see. UMNO members remain stuck in the mentality that they are over and above their BN colleagues, notwithstanding Najib’s ‘1Malaysia’ rhetoric. As the ruling coalition’s big brother, UMNO’s demands and categories take priority over other partners’ requests. This belief has been magnified since the 13th General Elections (GE13) of May 2013, with UMNO leaders consistently gloating over the fact that its performance had actually improved, winning 88 out of BN’s 133 victorious seats as compared with 79 out of 140 in 2008.

At GE13 some UMNO leaders realised that it paid handsomely to appeal to the ethnocentric sentiments of the Malay rural folk, whose voice in the national set-up had been given greater weight via past constituency delineation exercises many analysts find akin to gerrymandering. UMNO also found that its fortunes thrived on right-wing politics, dangerously so, as far as the dream of unity based on a Malaysian conception of nationhood was concerned. Najib, on his part, launching a host of Bumiputera economic empowerment programmes in September 2013, quite distastefully conceived them as a quid pro quo for the indigenous population’s support for BN in GE13. Although this may not be a corrupt practice per se, the seeds of money politics are unmistakably sowed on the understanding that pecuniary advantages accrue to a community in tandem with its communally inclined political support. The worrying impression that one gets by such politics is that economic fruits need not be distributed to unsupportive elements among the citizenry. If such a precedent becomes institutionalised, Najib has surely contributed, in a practical sense, to the ‘impossibility of democracy’ discourse on the lack of sustainability of regimes voted in by electoral majorities swayed by promises that incoming governments find impossible to finance.

Reports of a graft-ridden culture also continued to riddle the UMNO elections, and domination by party warlords remains unabated. The defeat at the divisional levels of genuine reformists such as Saifuddin Abdullah, former Deputy Minister of Higher Education credited for expanding academic freedom in Malaysia’s universities, speaks a lot about the intellectual mess in which the UMNO grassroots has become entangled in. If any zest exists among the UMNO rank and file for reform, it is not because they want to democratise out of a burning desire to do so, but rather, they have to, if only to ensure their political masters’ and their own survival in the rough-and-tumble world of UMNO realpolitik.

Ahmad Fauzi Abdul Hamid is Associate Professor and Chairman of Political Science, School of Distance Education, Universiti Sains Malaysia.