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2CIRCLES OF POWER AND COUNTERBALANCESsignificant positions in the state government. Thegovernor is the formal head of the state, appointedby the Yang di-Pertuan Agong (King). He has theright to appoint the Chief Minister and other stateministers from the state legislative assembly, basedon the assembly’s composition. However, in the stateunder study, these positions were actually decided innegotiations among the state’s ruling coalition parties.The federal government easily intervened and played adecisive role in the negotiations since the componentparties of the state coalition government were oftenunable to unite because of ethnic differences, personalrivalries and disputes over political alliances. In thissituation, the president of a Muslim-based party in theruling coalition has assumed the office of Chief Ministersince 1970 largely owing to backup from the federalgovernment and he, instead of the nominal governor,has controlled the state government.This paper focuses on the present Chief Minister (1981to the present), who was born to a local Muslim familyin 1936. His first occupation was in the judiciary aftergraduating from an Australian university in 1960.Along with his uncle, he became one of the prominentleaders of the Muslim-based party in the state coalitiongovernment of the 1960s. In 1963, he was appointedas state Minister of Communication and Works andthen Minister of Development and Forestry in 1966.He was, however, dismissed from the post in 1967because a non-Muslim based party dominant in thegovernment coalition at the time feared his party’sgrowing influence, backed by the federal government,over the state Cabinet. Afterwards, he was appointed toa federal ministry with the help of his uncle, who heldthe office of federal Minister of Lands and Mines.In 1970, his uncle assumed the office of Chief Ministerwith backup from then Prime Minister Abdul RazakHussein despite his long absence from state politicsdue to his federal ministership. In other words, hismarginalization in state politics by being placed in thefederal government resulted in him gaining a strongconnection with the national political leader, who hadan unofficial but significant influence over the selectionof state Chief Minister. After taking office, his uncle,however, failed to maintain a harmonious relationshipwith the other parties in the coalition government andthe electorate as a result of too great an accumulationof power and wealth in his hands and the neglect ofother communities in terms of the allocation of politicaland economic interests. He was also at enmity withHussein Onn, the successor to Abdul Razak as PrimeMinister, since Hussein regarded him as corrupt andas an ally of his predecessor. The Chief Minister arguedwith the federal government over a plot to overthrowhim and to engineer the state’s secession from Malaysia.Hussein Onn then effectively forced the Chief Ministerout from office and replaced him with his nephew, whowas Minister of Federal Territory at that time (Brown2001).The current Chief Minister succeeded in strikinga political balance among the leading politiciansrepresenting other government parties and ethnic groupsthrough the allocation of executive positions. While heheld the most important and profitable positions in thestate Cabinet (i.e., Chief Minister, Minister of Finance,Minister of Planning and Resource Management—thesuccessor of the Minister of Resource Planning), hedistributed other important positions to the other partyleaders to firm up political patronage. In the 2006Cabinet inauguration, for example, the non-Muslimdeputy president of the Chief Minister’s party and thepresident of the Chinese-based party, whose daughtermarried the Chief Minister’s son, were reappointedas Deputy Chief Ministers; the president of the non-Muslim-based party as Minister of Land Development;the president of another non-Muslim-based party asMinister of Social Development and Urbanization; anda Muslim senior politician as Minister of Housing.During the term of the current Chief Minister, the stateruling coalition parties steadily won the great majorityof seats in both state and general elections throughvarious ways. They include: vote-buying, the allocationof campaign funds only to the government parties’candidates, the establishment of new constituencies sothat the seats of the government parties would increase,the adoption of a ballot-counting system to obtain adetailed breakdown of the voting results of each village,the commitment to infrastructure building in returnfor supporting government parties in rural areas, theacceptance of an opposition party into the governingcoalition after the elections, and so forth. All federalparliamentarians elected from the state governmentparties in general elections have supported the nationalcoalition government (Barisan Nasional, BN) and thePrime Minister. The federal government, thus, does notinterfere with the Chief Minister as long as the statecoalition government provides crucial votes to keep thenational BN in power (Brown 2001).The legitimacy of the Chief Minister’s rule has beenaffirmed by the achievement of economic development.The state GDP progressively grew from 3,488 millionringgit in 1980 to 5,291 million ringgit in 1985, to 6,558million ringgit in 1990 and to 9,629 million ringgit in1995. A decline in the poverty rate has accompaniedAsian Transformations in ActionThe Work of the 2006/2007 API Fellows