In the end, the margin of victory in the Kuala Terengganu by-election was not a huge one at 2,631 votes.

However, it was big enough to tell Barisan Nasional (BN) candidate Wan Ahmad Farid Wan Salleh that his decision to quit his senatorship and cabinet portfolio was a silly one, even if pushed by his equally banal boss, premier Abdullah Ahmad Badawi.

But Umno will look after Ahmad Farid, including financially, whilst he lingers in the political wilderness. That’s how the crony-infested corrupt Umno and its coalition partners MCA and MIC work. And that is the key reason why even the Malay majority in Kuala Terengganu turned its back on Umno and BN.

abdullah ahmad badawi pak lah pc 050908 04 Abdullah will retire in March, and the Kuala Terengganu by-election result will be part of his massively tattered legacy - one almost as bad as that of outgoing US president George W Bush.

Like Bush, Abdullah has been Malaysian’s worst and weakest prime minister; an incompetent political architect who couldn’t bring a highly fractionalised Umno to heel, let alone steer the heavily trade-dependent Malaysian economy out of certain, deeply-rooted recession. He’ll walk way with deserved ignominy, handing the reins to his deputy and nemesis, Mahathir’s protégé Najib Abdul Razak.

In a recent column, I said the KT by-election was always about Najib . And that’s regardless of whatever spin he had put on the poll during the campaign and whatever spin he produces after it.

At a press conference after the result was declared Najib rejected the argument that it reflects poorly on him. His position is a no-brainer. And it’s banal.

anwar ibrahim lim kit siang 030606 After all, more than even Anwar Ibrahim (left) and Lim Kit Siang (right) , it was Najib who was pulling out all stops to ensure that Ahmad Farid would win. If the candidate had been Abdullah’s stooge, Najib wouldn’t have worried about doing more than his token bit for him.

But he did more than that. Much more. Najib campaigned fiercely, criss-crossing the electorate umpteen times in a bid to help Ahmad Farid. All the while, however, he knew that the poll was more about himself than about Ahmad Farid.

It was a test of Najib’s credibility as a politician, as the next Umno president and Malaysian prime minister. The by-election result wasn’t the landslide that some pundits had predicted but the majority was sufficiently large to deliver a thunderous blow to Najib’s solar plexus.

Mahathir’s legacy

By no means does the by-election result deliver Najib a mortal wound. It won’t stop him from becoming Umno president and Malaysian prime minister in March.

Thanks to the crooked ways of Umno’s election of its leaders, as indeed all the BN parties choose their leaders, the poll result shows at least two things. One is that the mood of one of the most conservative or traditionalist Malay states has shifted - quite dramatically - away from Umno in particular and BN secondarily.

kuala terengganu by election 170109 wahid announcement Umno was always going to struggle in Terengganu, which it has held but by the barest majority since the last federal election. Whilst the latest poll result confirms that the Malay vote has moved towards the opposition parties, it has, in Kuala Terengganu, moved towards PAS.

More significantly, though, the non-Malay vote can be translated as its confidence, at the very least, in PAS but, at the most, as a marked protest and disenchantment with the major non-Malay BN component parties.

MCA and MIC have long been mired in high-level factional politics and elitism rather than genuine representation and the democratic process. Both are, like Umno, feudalistic parties, with their governing elites protecting and advancing only their own and their vested crony interests. Umno remains the patronage state and all three major parties use the state to pursue class-based corporatist politics that cuts across race.

This practice is not new. Mahathir had introduced this form as the transformational basis of the Malaysian political economy. But it strongly advanced corruption, cronysim and nepotism. The winners were the political and economic elites, all of whom were bestowed ludicrous state honours for their crookedness, at the expense of citizens.

Abdullah inherited this system in 2003, with the promise of breaking it up. But he found, quickly, that he had completely misunderstood the power of Malaysian corporatist politics. It’s so embedded in the Malaysian institutions, and is far bigger than Abdullah. It’s even bigger than Anwar.

najib parliament 141008 And now Najib, who has championed this form of corporatism, will inherit the Mahathir legacy -with all of its institutions and structures. And he’ll promote it because he has to, because it’s those factions loyal to Mahathir who possess the greatest influence over the state.

After all, just prior to the Kuala Terengganu poll, Najib was too busy handing out financially lucrative parcels of contracts, without any transparency, accountability or responsibility, to small-scale bumiputera businessmen in that state.

Incidentally, it is also where his political constituency resides - a heritage from his late father, Abdul Razak Hussein, who instituted and presided over the vile and racist New Economic Policy (NEP) from1970 following race riots the previous year.

Eyes now on Najib

The newest by-election trend is also a trend that has followed from the March 2008 federal election as well as the return of Anwar to the seat of Permatang Pauh after a decade’s absence from the centre of national politics.

It says that the Kuala Terengganu electorate has increasingly less confidence in the Umno-led BN regime and in Najib. What it says is that the electorate now sees right through the feudalistic character of Umno (and to that extent, that of MCA and MIC), and that they have had enough of the corrupt leadership of these parties.

The by-election result shows quite clearly, that in this highly traditional, deeply conservative, majority Malay controlled state, Malay, Chinese and Indian voters have forged their voices into one and heaped onto the next prime minister their dislike, if not distrust, of his rulership.

mongolian woman bombed altantuya 081106 Not that Najib has made any impact on national politics since being elevated to becoming Umno deputy president and deputy prime minister. In fact, his reputation has become so soiled, especially following the allegations of his [strongly denied] links to the dead Mongolian national Altantuya Shaariibuu.

As long as the murder trial continues, Najib’s reputation is questioned. But so long as the Malaysian judiciary’s reputation remains highly questionable, Najib’s credibility is close to ruins, especially if he continues maintain and defend the status quo of the NEP and the Mahathir era.

So, all eyes will be on the Umno general assembly in March. Until then, Malaysians - and foreigners like me - will closely monitor every move that Najib makes and every word he utters.

Will Najib become Malaysia's next worst premier and fuel the ire of all Malaysians, including - and especially - the non-establishment Malays?

MANJIT BHATIA, an academician and writer, is also research director of AsiaRisk, a political, economic and risk analysis consultancy in Australia. He specialises in international economics and politics, with a focus on the Asia-Pacific.