Nurul Izzah: PKR’s Rising Star

Nurul Izzah : The Rising Star of People’s Justice Party (PKR)

by LIZ GOOCH

When Nurul Izzah Anwar was elected last month to one of the senior leadership posts in the People’s Justice Party (PKR) at the age of 30, she became the youngest person to hold such a position in the Malaysian party’s history.

Her success in contesting one of the four vice president positions came just two years after she was elected to Parliament, but her public image has been more than a decade in the making and is inextricably tied to one of Malaysia’s most recognizable politicians.

The eldest daughter of Anwar Ibrahim, Ms. Nurul Izzah traces her political birth back more than a decade, to when Mr. Anwar, a former deputy prime minister, was jailed on charges of sodomy and abuse of power.

The jailing of Mr. Anwar, who was released in 2004 after the sodomy charges were overturned, was a pivotal event in his transformation into the leader of Malaysia’s opposition. It also propelled Ms. Nurul Izzah, just 18 at the time of her father’s arrest, into public life, beginning with an impassioned plea for her father’s freedom before the U.N. Commission on Human Rights in Geneva.

Now, as her father, who was re-elected to Parliament in 2008, faces a second sodomy trial that he denounces as a government conspiracy to thwart his political return, Ms. Nurul Izzah’s own political star is rising. Her recent victory has cemented her position as a key player in the People’s Justice Party, which her father founded and of which her mother, Wan Azizah Wan Ismail, is president.

“I don’t think after going through 1998 it would be possible to retreat back to a non-political life,” Ms. Nurul Izzah said, referring to her father’s first arrest.

While some analysts view her election to one of the party’s top posts as an important step toward emerging from her father’s shadow, others take it as a sign that Mr. Anwar’s family is engaging in dynastic politics.

In an interview in the opposition offices of the Malaysian Parliament, Ms. Nurul Izzah, the only one of Mr. Anwar’s six children to follow their parents into political life, insisted on her independence.

“Of course I love my father dearly, but at the end of the day, I am a legislator in my own right,” she said. “I have to fight my own wars, and I have my community and constituents to serve. I am answerable to them.”

She emphasized that she was not appointed but rather elected by the party’s members after campaigning against 17 contenders for the four vice-presidential posts.

“I am proud of the fact that we had to fight,” she said of the internal party contest. “I believe the fact that we have implemented direct elections as a way to choose our leaders was the best way to celebrate democracy in the party and to prove that no one particular individual can hold sway in terms of affecting the decisions or the outcomes.”

She also said that campaigning for her father’s freedom had been her own decision, and not the result of family pressure. “It was the right thing to do,” she said.

It was her work with human rights organizations as well as her father’s arrest, she said, that gave her an understanding of “the things that matter in Malaysia — the state of our judiciary, the state of our civil and political liberties,” and convinced her that politics offered an opportunity to effect change.

After earning a bachelor’s degree in engineering in Malaysia, Ms. Nurul Izzah completed a master’s in international relations at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.

She returned to Malaysia in 2007 and was coordinating the People’s Justice Party’s activities in Lembai Pantai, a suburban Kuala Lumpur constituency, when the party asked her to run for Parliament in the 2008 election.

“I had just had a baby then, but in a sense, that was an important move, I felt, in trying to garner support from our young voters,” said Ms. Nurul Izzah, who has two children with her husband, Raja Ahmad Shahrir, who works for the management consulting firm, Accenture.

She defeated the three-term incumbent Shahrizat Abdul Jalil, who is now the minister for women, family and community development, contributing to impressive gains by the opposition and, for the first time in nearly four decades, the governing party’s loss of the two-thirds parliamentary majority needed to amend the Constitution.

Her father’s most recent tribulations inevitably give rise to the question of whether Ms. Nurul Izzah could eventually step into his shoes as leader of the opposition.

As his second sodomy trial proceeds, the People’s Justice Party has said that there is a succession plan in the event that Mr. Anwar is jailed again. It has been a turbulent season for him. Last week, he was suspended from Parliament for six months for linking the government’s “1 Malaysia” national unity program with a similar campaign in Israel.

While Ms. Nurul Izzah said the party must “prepare for the worst,” she sidestepped the question of whether she could be a possible successor to her father. “It’s not about me or what role I would play, but what’s our strategy moving forward,” she said.

Ong Kian Ming, a political analyst and lecturer at UCSI University in Kuala Lumpur, believes that Mr. Anwar would continue to be the party’s de facto leader even if he returns to prison, and that the next step for Ms. Nurul Izzah would probably be the deputy presidency. If her mother stepped down from the presidency, the current deputy, Azmin Ali, would normally be next in line, but Ms. Nurul Izzah could always challenge him for the top job, Mr. Ong said.

“She’s at the forefront of a small group of leaders who can and will replace Anwar eventually,” he said.

Bridget Welsh, an Associate Professor of Political Science at Singapore Management University who taught Ms. Nurul Izzah at Johns Hopkins, said her leadership potential was evident early on. But despite the “small steps” Ms. Nurul Izzah has taken to distance herself from her father, Ms. Welsh said she was still “perceived rightly or wrongly as her father’s daughter” and must blaze her own political path.

Mr. Ong said that any critics within the party had so far kept any resentments about her rapid rise to themselves, and that the young politician had yet to be vigorously tested by internal or external opponents.

“She’s not really been put through the fire,” Mr. Ong said. “It will be interesting to see how she responds when that moment of political crisis comes about, and it will come.”

Ms. Nurul Izzah has repeatedly stressed the need to overcome ethnic and religious divisions in Malaysia, where tensions periodically flare, like the firebombing of places of worship early this year.

She has warned that Malaysia is at risk of becoming a “failed state” if it does not address such tensions and take on issues like the quality of the country’s universities, corruption and laws that prevent free speech.

While her rise through the party’s ranks has been rapid, overcoming such challenges is likely to require a sustained effort. But Ms. Nurul Izzah emphasizes that she is in for the long haul.

“In terms of promoting and advocating reform,” she said, “I think it should be a lifelong struggle.”

courtesy of Din Merican