Back In the Light

Anwar Ibrahim takes six calls in quick succession on three different mobile phones. Five days after Malaysia's general election—in which his coalition shocked observers by winning several key states and almost ousting the long-ruling party—he has segued from surprise victor to tireless political operative, ironing out disagreements and building bridges within the still-fractious opposition. Inside his low-key suburban office, tucked several kilometers away from Parliament in leafy Kuala Lumpur, Anwar's sense of purpose—destiny, even—is palpable. "Just listen to what the others have to say. Listen," he tells one caller. "Stay calm, go home and have some dinner, some Panadol, whatever you need," he tells another, adding, "If there are still strong views and you can't solve it, let me handle [it]."

The performance is vintage Anwar: the great conciliator doing what he does best. Barely a decade ago, this was the man who was going to help Asia and the West see eye to eye and bridge the chasm between Islam and other faiths. As Finance minister and then deputy prime minister of Malaysia in the late 1990s, Anwar was heir apparent to the strongman Mahathir Mohammed. But it was always an odd pairing. Mahathir was an angry anti-colonialist, forever railing against the West; he denounced Western pressure for democracy and human rights as cultural imperialism, an affront to more authoritarian "Asian values," and fiercely resisted international attempts to dismantle Malaysia's cozy and corrupt business culture after the Asian financial crisis. Anwar, by contrast, was a proud universalist, a personally pious Muslim who was also a relentless modernizer and whose penchant for quoting Gandhi and declaring the necessity of democracy and economic openness won him international acclaim. In speeches filled with terms like "civil society" and "freedom," Anwar opposed the notion that Asians were somehow destined for repressive rule and sought to turn regional vehicles like ASEAN into forces to promote liberty and justice. This won him widespread adoration—he was named NEWSWEEK's Asian of the Year in 1998—and made him a darling of the Davos set.

But it also led to his downfall. By 1998, Mahathir had had enough of his high-flying deputy, and after Anwar publicly broke with his boss over the response to the Asian financial crisis (which Anwar hoped to use to impose fiscal discipline and dismantle Mahathir's crony system), he was sacked and then jailed on what were widely seen as trumped-up corruption and sodomy charges. "It was a terrible time," Anwar admits in a NEWSWEEK interview, but not one he is not eager to revisit. Asked about Mahathir, over whom he would appear to have scored a historic reversal of fortune, Anwar won't take the bait, dismissing his former patron as old, ill and "not an issue for me … In order to succeed, we have to look beyond him."

Under Malaysian law, Anwar is barred from holding office until April 15. Yet clearly the rising fortunes of his party make him once again a potential prime minister, though this time around his ambitions appear focused solely on Malaysia, not Asia and the world. Asked if he was poised once again to act as a bridge figure between East and West, Anwar embraced that "important role" as one he had been "playing for a long time," but then quickly gave it a distinctly local focus: reassuring both Malays and non-Malays and getting them to work together in his party.

Thanks to widespread disgust with the lackluster performance of Prime Minister Abdullah Badawi, the three-party opposition more than quadrupled its presence in Parliament (going from 20 to 82 seats out of 222), and it now controls five of Malaysia's 13 states. The greater import is clear: even some members of Abdullah's camp are now calling for his resignation, and "Anwar has returned as a major force," says Bridget Welsh, a Southeast Asia expert at Johns Hopkins University in Washington.

But the opposition still has to parlay those results into effective control. For the moment, Abdullah remains in charge, if barely. Still, the election was a water- shed, the closest the ruling United Malays National Organization (UMNO) has come to defeat since independence in 1957. The best Abdullah could say about the drubbing was to call it "democracy at work," and Mahathir, who retired in 2003, called it "shocking"—adding, suggestively, "The Japanese would have committed hara-kiri."

The vote also represented a major challenge to Malaysia's wide-ranging race-based affirmative-action program, which, under Mahathir gave the country's ethnic Malay majority broad preferences over the long-dominant Chinese community in business affairs. Even if the fragile center now holds in Kuala Lumpur, UMNO will soon face unprecedented threats from state governments now controlled by the opposition. Following a pattern discernible elsewhere in Southeast Asia, Anwar and his allies are staging an assault on the cronyism and patronage of old and pledging social justice, openness, transparency, and anticorruption measures.

The new movement is something of a sequel to the failed Reformasi drive of the late 1990s. Launched by Anwar after his ouster in late 1998, it aimed to ignite a "people power" uprising of the sort that had toppled Suharto in Indonesia. But Reformasi fizzled after Anwar's criminal conviction; he ultimately served six years in prison.