Malaysian prosecutors charged opposition leader Muhyiddin Yassin with treason on August 27. His crime? Alleging that the King failed to ask him to form a government after the last general election, despite claiming he had the support of a majority in Parliament. This is the second charge against Muhyiddin. Last year, prosecutors charged him with misappropriating funds during his tenure as prime minister from 2020 to 2021, charges he denies.
In an illiberal democracy like Malaysia, this accusation may seem unremarkable, with one exception: the man the king asked to form a government in 2022 is Anwar Ibrahim, who was jailed twice on false charges of homosexuality while he was opposition leader. At the time, Anwar was a darling of Western reporters and government officials, hailed as someone who could liberalize Malaysian politics if only the prime minister would unlock his cell. But since taking power as head of a coalition government in November 2022, Anwar has emerged as a very different type of leader.
He has defended the use of sedition laws to protect the monarchy and denies that their use against opponents is the result of political interference. In a country that has for too long been defined by the institutionalized privilege of the Malay majority, he has told supporters that commitments to a more pluralistic agenda must wait. And with Malaysia still not fully recovering from the 1MDB scandal, in which $4.5 billion was stolen from its coffers, he has defended his deputy prime minister accused of corruption and the decision to drop the charges against him.
Western backing has also not garnered support for Anwar during his years of isolation. The prime minister will visit Vladivostok next week to meet President Vladimir Putin. In May he visited Qatar and met with Ismail Haniyeh, the Hamas leader killed in Tehran on July 31. After lobbying for support for Beijing and meeting with Chinese Premier Li Qiang in June, Malaysia suddenly announced it would support “unification” of Taiwan with mainland China.
The West got Anwar wrong. But that shouldn't be a surprise. Western governments often back Asian opposition parties promising a liberal approach without scrutinizing their records or the everyday language they speak to public audiences back home. In Anwar's case, his time as deputy prime minister to Mahathir Mohamad, Malaysia's authoritarian, anti-Western prime minister from 1981 to 2003, was supposed to offer clues about how he would govern.
Why do Western government officials often support the wrong Asian leaders? First, they are easily persuaded by people who have spent a lot of time in Europe or North America, where they tend to learn to speak about universal values that Westerners recognize. That doesn't mean they will adopt those values themselves. When Aung San Suu Kyi, the former leader of Myanmar, was under house arrest in the 1990s, she appealed to Westerners to “use your freedom to spread our freedom,” citing her decades of experience in Britain and the United States. But as a government leader, she trampled on concepts of freedom and democracy and defended the military's brutality against Rohingya Muslims.
Western opinion leaders' views of their country's politics are often refracted through influential individuals. Many Americans came to understand Malaysian politics through the lens of Robert Rubin, who served as Treasury Secretary under President Bill Clinton in the 1990s and was friends with Anwar when he served as finance minister. Expatriates can also play a role. Cambodian opposition leader Sam Rainsy's cause has benefited from the slick activism of prominent figures in exile, but his election campaign back home has been riddled with denunciations of the country's ethnic Vietnamese.
Power can also change leaders, as Indonesia's President Joko Widodo has done. But when Asian leaders prove to be anything but liberal, Western authorities sometimes hang on to them for longer. There is an element of Orientalism in this: Western authorities tend to tolerate Asian leaders behaving in ways that they would not tolerate in Europe or the Americas.
It is possible to avoid these traps. Independent institutions can be trusted to defend rights and freedoms better than individuals. They deserve more support. But when it comes to leaders, Western governments should stick to their principles, even if their friends abandon them.
