Ismail Sabri Yaakob on August 19, 2021. Ismail will become the new Prime Minister of Malaysia.
Mat Zain | NurPhoto | Getty Images
Malaysian King Al-Sultan Abdullah has appointed Ismail Sabri Yaakob as the new prime minister, the palace said in a statement on Friday.
Ismail will be the third prime minister of Malaysia in three years. He was sworn in on Saturday after receiving the support of 114 members of parliament, the palace said. This exceeds the 111 required for a simple majority.
Ismail’s predecessor, Muhyiddin Yassin, resigned on Monday after just over 17 months in power. Muhyiddin had lost majority support in parliament due to fights in his ruling political coalition.
The appointment of Ismail, who was deputy prime minister under Muhyiddin, would essentially keep the ruling coalition intact.
But his rise means the country’s most governing political party – the National Organization of United Malaysia or UMNO – has regained Malaysia’s presidency after a shocking loss in 2018.
UMNO was the ruling party in a coalition that ruled Malaysia for more than 60 years, but lost power in the 2018 general election due to a financial scandal involving the 1MDB state fund.
The party returned to power in 2020 after the sudden resignation of then-Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad, which allowed Muhyiddin to form the current ruling coalition. Muhyiddin said in a statement Thursday that non-UMNO coalition lawmakers would support Ismail as the new prime minister, provided the new cabinet does not include anyone with judicial charges.
Several UMNO lawmakers, including party president Ahmad Zahid Hamidi and former Prime Minister Najib Razak, are currently facing charges of corruption. Both Zahid and Najib denied the foul.
“Recipe for instability”
Prior to the appointment of Malaysia’s new prime minister, political analysts said Ismail would be a bad choice because of his association with the Muhyiddin government, which was widely criticized for mistreating the worsening of the country’s Covid-19 outbreak.
Ismail’s appointments will not end the political uncertainty Malaysia has faced since the 2018 elections, analysts said.
The political situation in Malaysia is a “recipe for instability,” Peter Mumford, head of internship at Eurasia Group, a risk consultant in southeast and south, told CNBC’s Capital Connection on Tuesday. Asia.
Malaysia has many political parties and none has more than 20% of parliamentary seats, while politicians do not differ much in their economic ideology, as politics is based primarily on race and religion, Mumford explained.
In addition, politicians are not loyal to their parties and are “quite happy” to change parties, he said.
“One of the key ways out of this political mess is to hold another round of general elections, and after these negotiations on who could be the next prime minister. And if these elections make a party or a coalition have a clear majority, there will be more than one stable government, ”Mumford said.