Malaysia's Politics Has Always Been About Race and Religion These Two Men Want to Change That

For as long as most Malaysians can remember, politics here has followed the same basic script. You know your community, you know your party, and you vote accordingly. Race and religion have been the organising principles of Malaysian political life since before independence, baked into the party system, the coalition arrangements, and the daily language of political debate.

But something may be shifting. And two names keep coming up in that conversation.

The Two Men Everyone Is Watching

Tengku Zafrul Aziz and Khairy Jamaluddin are not newcomers to Malaysian public life. Both have served in the Cabinet. Both have built reputations as competent, credible administrators. And both are increasingly being talked about as something rarer in Malaysian political leaders whose appeal cuts across communal lines rather than running along them.

Political analyst Mazlan Ali describes them as the "new face" of Malaysian politics, and his reasoning is worth understanding. What sets these two apart, he argues, isn't just their moderate image or their relatively polished presentation. It's that their politics is built around arguments, evidence, and service delivery rather than around who you are and which community you belong to. They talk about what the government can do rather than which group the government should protect.

Tengku Zafrul served as finance minister and later as investment, trade, and industry minister before his current role as senior political adviser to the Prime Minister and chairman of the Malaysian Investment Development Authority. Khairy came up through youth and sports, moved to science and technology, and became one of the country's most visible public figures during his time as health minister, a role that put him in front of cameras throughout the pandemic years and showed a different kind of political communication than Malaysians were used to seeing.

A political observer who spoke anonymously put it this way: both men delivered on their promises when they were in Cabinet. In Malaysian politics, that is not always a given.

Why Change Has Been So Hard

To understand why Zafrul and Khairy represent something different, you have to understand how deep the old script goes.

Malaysian political parties were formed largely along racial lines before independence. BN, anchored by Umno, built a hegemonic coalition model that dominated the country for decades. That model cracked in 2018, but it didn't disappear. What followed was a succession of governments under PH, PN, a BN-led administration, and now Anwar Ibrahim's unity government, but the underlying communal logic of Malaysian politics has persisted through all of them.

Malay-based parties like PAS, Umno, and Bersatu still rely heavily on Malay-Muslim narratives, recurring disputes over the word "Allah," claims that Islam is under threat, and identity politics as a mobilisation tool. Non-Malay parties, including DAP, MCA, MIC, and Gerakan, continue leaning on communal concerns to stay relevant to their respective voter bases. Even within the current unity government, which officially promotes transparency and efficient governance, traces of the older playbook continue to surface.

Mazlan traces the first real rupture in this system to 1998, when Anwar Ibrahim was sacked from Umno and the reformasi movement was born. That period coincided with globalisation, rising education levels, and the rapid growth of online media, creating conditions for what political scholars call "new politics." Less dependent on racial and religious mobilisation. More influenced by information, openness, and a flatter political environment.

That new politics has grown. But it hasn't won. Not yet.

The Urban-Rural Divide at the Heart of It All

One of the most important things Mazlan points out is that the shift toward issue-based politics isn't happening evenly across the country. It's concentrated in urban and semi-urban constituencies, among younger, educated, and mobile voters who follow policy debates and feel the direct effects of economic decisions.

In those places, economic performance matters enormously. Investment, jobs, wages, and industrial policy are the conversations that resonate with people who are connected, informed, and economically mobile.

But in rural constituencies, Felda settlements, and traditional villages, the picture is different. These communities remain more closely tied to race, religion, and long-established political identities. Economic narratives alone often don't move them. This helps explain why PH consistently performs better in cities while parties running on more traditional communal platforms hold their ground in rural Malaysia.

It also explains why any real shift in Malaysian politics is going to take time because changing the political culture of a country isn't just about producing leaders with better ideas. It requires changing the conditions in which voters make their choices.

What Comes Next

Mazlan is cautiously optimistic but clear-eyed about the timeline. A more moderate, modern political culture in Malaysia would require stronger political education, changing social conditions, and a new generation of voters whose expectations are simply different from those of their parents.

He also makes an observation worth sitting with, that Tengku Zafrul and Khairy's political thinking bears closer resemblance to leaders in countries like Sweden and Australia than to the typical Malaysian political archetype. Whether that is ultimately an advantage or a liability in Malaysian electoral politics is a genuinely open question.

"Zafrul has succeeded in proving his worth by bringing progress to the country without being tied to the agenda of the old political script," Mazlan said. Of Khairy, he notes that while he still operates within the broader framework of right-leaning Malay nationalism, he is gradually moving closer to Zafrul's approach.

The old script is deeply embedded. The people who benefit from it are not going to abandon it voluntarily. And the electorate is not a monolith. Urban Malaysia and rural Malaysia have very different conversations about what they want from their politicians.

But for the first time in a while, there are figures in Malaysian public life making the case for a different kind of politics, not by abandoning their identity or their roots, but by insisting that those things don't have to be the only basis on which the country makes its decisions.

Whether Malaysia is ready to follow them is the question that the next few election cycles will answer.