A pick-up in the country’s vaccine rollout should give the PM an overwhelming incentive to keep buying time — ideally by using extended emergency rule to keep politics, as it were, under lockdown.
Just over six months ago, Malaysian Prime Minister Muhyiddin Yassin talked the country’s monarch into declaring a state of emergency – the first in the country since the devastating racial riots of 1969.
Muhyiddin said the emergency was to give his government the political stability and the legal powers needed to enforce COVID-19 control strategies. At the time, a spike in cases had threatened to derail what had been overall an effective response to the initial wave of the pandemic in 2020.
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Liam Gammon is a research fellow in the East Asian Bureau of Economic Research and an editor at East Asia Forum (www.eastasiaforum.org) in the Crawford School of Public Policy at the ANU’s College of Asia and the Pacific.
