Congratulations to Malaysia and its new Prime Minister, Anwar Ibrahim, at the end of a bizarre and triumphant 25-year journey unlike anything else I've heard of in politics.
Back in 1998, Anwar was Finance Minister, and had won international recognition for getting Malaysia through the Asian financial crisis. Worried that Anwar might be getting too powerful, Prime Minister Mahathir Mohammed had him arrested on sodomy charges. The alleged victim testified under oath that the charges were actually false, and a semen-stained mattress that supposedly had Anwar's DNA was retracted from evidence when the chemist proved untrustworthy. Nevertheless, Anwar was sent to prison in 1999 until his conviction was overturned in 2004.
Anwar returned to politics as a forceful critic of Mahathir's successor, Prime Minister Najib Razak. In 2008, Anwar was accused of forcible sodomy by top aide Saiful Bukhari. When people asked burly 24-year-old Saiful how the slender 61-year-old Anwar had physically overcome him, Saiful downgraded his former accusations to "homosexual conduct by persuasion", still a serious crime under Malaysia's Islamic government. It was soon revealed that Saiful had gone to Najib's apartment on June 24, shortly before the alleged sodomy of June 26, two days before he filed the police report and was medically inspected on June 28.
The case went to trial in 2010, with the contents of Saiful's rectum becoming the central topic of Malaysian politics for over a month. I will spare you the gory details. But if you want to look up articles with headlines like "Saiful’s rectum was EMPTY, doctor tells court" and "Saiful inserted plastic in anus, court told" and consider the expert testimony on how the contents of rectums change over time, the internet is open to you.
Anwar was acquitted. But in 2014, a Court of Appeal overturned the acquittal. Anwar was imprisoned for five years without a new trial, because this is Malaysia.
Around that time, Najib stole $700 million from the government's national investment fund. (When people asked why $700 million had suddenly appeared in his bank account, he tried to pass it off as a gift from a Saudi royal.) He was denounced by former Prime Minister Mahathir, whose own corruption hadn't risen to such extreme heights.
Anwar wanted to defeat Najib, and there was one way to do it. He teamed up with Mahathir, who had imprisoned him on false sodomy charges 20 years before. The men agreed on a deal where Mahathir would become Prime Minister first, and make the still-imprisoned Anwar his successor. As the 2018 elections approached, fear arose that Najib wouldn't respect a close election defeat, and violence would result. But Anwar's reformists and Mahathir's old connections proved unstoppable. Their new Harapan coalition won 121 out of 222 seats, a resounding victory that Najib had no way to overturn. Anwar was freed from prison.
In 2020, Harapan fell apart, and Malay ethnic nationalist leader Muhyiddin Yassin became Prime Minister. Anwar became Leader of the Opposition, in part because Mahathir was 95 years old. On November 20 of this year, new elections resulted in a hung parliament, with Anwar's regenerated Harapan the biggest party at 82 seats. On November 24, Mahathir had lost his seat in Parliament, Najib was serving his corruption sentence at Kajang Prison, and Anwar became the Prime Minister of Malaysia.
