Ask anyone over teh tarik what they think of politics these days and watch the face they make first. Not anger. Not passion. Just a tired little exhale, the kind you give when someone brings up a topic you’ve already given up on.
That exhale is the real story of this election season. Not the manifestos, not the coalition maths, not the speeches. The exhale, because the question hanging over all of it is not who governs. It’s whether we believe a single word any of them say anymore.
You can date the rot fairly precisely. February 2020. The Sheraton Move.
Before that, Malaysians could still kid themselves that the ballot meant something, that the government you voted for was roughly the government you got.
Then a few dozen men sat in a hotel and rearranged the country between dinner and dessert, and the whole illusion came apart in a weekend. The frog-hopping after that just rubbed it in.
We learned, all of us, that a vote was an opening bid. Not a final answer. And once a people learn that lesson, you cannot make them unlearn it.
The fatigue is real, and it’s earned. We keep calling it apathy. Lazy youth, distracted voters who can’t be bothered.
That’s a comfortable story for the people in power because it puts the blame on the rakyat instead of on them. But it’s the wrong word. This isn’t apathy. It’s exhaustion.
When a pakcik shrugs and says “semua sama saja”, that’s not ignorance. That’s a man who has been paying attention.
He watched parties that had sworn they’d never work together suddenly share a cabinet. He watched “perjuangan” evaporate the second a better offer appeared. The contempt people feel didn’t come from nowhere. We taught it to them, lesson by lesson.
Peak turnout to steady decline
Now look at the numbers, because the numbers don’t shrug. Here’s where it stops being a vibe and starts being measurable.
Go back to the 13th general election in 2013. Turnout hit 84.84 percent, the highest in the country’s history. 85 out of every 100 eligible Malaysians dragged themselves to a polling station. That was a country that believed its vote could change something, and in 2018, that belief paid off.
GE14, 2018. Still strong, somewhere in the low-to-mid 80s, and it toppled a government that had ruled since independence. Peak faith. People showed up because showing up worked. Then GE15, 2022. Turnout fell to about 74 percent.
And here’s the part that should worry everyone, because it happened despite the deck being stacked the other way. Undi18 and automatic registration had just dumped around six million fresh names onto the rolls.
The electorate jumped from roughly 15 million to over 21 million almost overnight. Every structural force was pushing turnout up.
It still fell, and the steepest drops were among the young and the urban, the very people Undi18 was supposed to switch on. We handed millions of new voters a ballot, and a large share of them looked at it and stayed home.
But the general election figure is the flattering one. The number that really reveals the mood is the by-election, because a by-election is what people do when nothing dramatic is forcing their hand. It’s the honest reading.
So watch the slide.
Mahkota, Johor, September 2024. A general election there in 2022 pulled around 73 percent. The by-election? 53.84 percent. Roughly twenty points gone in two years.
Sungai Bakap, Penang, July 2024. Stuck in the mid-forties through the afternoon, the chief minister was practically begging people to come out.
Ayer Kuning, Perak, April 2025. By 11am, the Election Commission (EC) chairperson was on camera, admitting turnout was only 26 percent and openly worried. It clawed up to about 58 percent by closing, but the EC had wanted 70. Even PAS turned around and blamed its loss on people simply not showing up.
That’s the pattern. The big emotional elections still pull a crowd, just a thinner one than before. But the ordinary ones, the quiet ones, the ones that test whether democracy has become a habit rather than an event, those are bleeding voters. And the people walking away first are young and urban.
A democracy where your most cynical citizens are also your youngest is a democracy quietly spending down its own future and pretending the balance is fine.
A case study in political fluidity
If you want one human being who shows you the whole disease in a single career, you don’t have to look hard.
Tengku Zafrul Abdul Aziz became finance minister in 2020 without ever winning an election, parachuted into the cabinet as an appointed senator.
In 2022, he finally faced voters in Kuala Selangor and lost. Lost. And then he was reappointed to the senate so he could keep the ministry anyway. The voters said no, and it simply didn’t matter.
Then in May 2025, he walks out of Umno, the only party he’d ever belonged to since 1997, and within months, he’s wearing PKR colours, the party of the very prime minister he was already serving.
He called it a matter of principle, said his struggle aligned better there.
Maybe.
But you’ll forgive the ordinary voter for reading it the obvious way, as a man tracking the gravity of power, making sure he stayed close to the office once his Senate term ran out in December. And here’s the detail that should stop you.
Even Rafizi Ramli, no opponent of this government, warned at the time that this kind of party-hopping risked opening a floodgate that the coalition wouldn’t be able to close.
When people inside the tent are the ones ringing the alarm about the principle being treated as disposable, you can’t really blame the rakyat for deciding the principle was never holding any weight to begin with.
Authenticity is democracy’s real currency
This isn’t about hating one man. Zafrul’s just the clearest specimen of the whole sickness.
Loyalty that flows toward power. Conviction, you can renegotiate. The one reliable instinct is to stand near the chair when the music stops.
This matters more than any seat count. Authenticity is the actual currency that makes democracy run.
We follow laws we didn’t personally vote for because we believe the system that made them is legit. We swallow an election loss because we trust the winner earned it and will have to face us again.
Pull authenticity out of that machine, and what’s left isn’t democracy. It’s a performance, acted out by people we don’t trust, in front of an audience that’s quietly getting up and leaving the hall.
That’s the real stake this season. Not which side scrapes together a majority. But whether enough Malaysians still think the whole exercise is worth their Saturday.
The fix isn’t complicated. It’s just hard. It means saying the same thing backstage as you do on the stage.
It means a party willing to lose an election rather than win it by throwing away the reason it exists. It means treating a vote like a covenant instead of a bargaining position.
Nobody’s asking for saints. The rakyat gave up on saints a long time ago. They’re asking for politicians who actually mean it. And the saddest thing about this whole moment is how wild, how almost naive, that small request has started to sound.
The voters aren’t tired of democracy.
They’re tired of being taken for fools.
And honestly, who could blame them? - Mkini
FARHAN IQBAL is an aide to former minister and ex-PKR deputy president Rafizi Ramli.
The views expressed here are those of the author/contributor and do not necessarily represent the views of MMKtT.
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