Will the Johor polls kill the unity government before GE16?

**Zurairi A.R.** (0:02)
This is a podcast by The Straits Times.
Ape kabar, everyone. Welcome back to Asian Insider, where we go across the causeway and explore Malaysia's current affairs and trends every fourth Friday of every other month. I'm Zurairi AR, Assistant Foreign Editor at The Straits Times. And joining me as always is our Malaysia Bureau Chief, Shannon Teoh. Shannon, good to have you back.

**Shannon Teoh** (0:31)
Good to be back from across the causeway as usual.

**Zurairi A.R.** (0:34)
And our guest today is someone who has been tracking Malaysian politics and governance longer than most, Dr. Francis Hutchinson, coordinator of the Malaysia Studies Programme at ISEAS–Yusof Ishak Institute here in Singapore.
Francis, great to have you on the show. And of course, in the house here at the new centre.

**Dr Francis Hutchinson** (0:50)
Thank you very much. You've got a lovely studio. And I'm very happy to be here and also happy to be featuring alongside Shannon.

**Zurairi A.R.** (0:58)
Yeah, well, Shannon, Francis, welcome. I'm not sure if you have been following the World Cup, but have you had any chance to watch any of the matches at all or any standout performance so far?

**Shannon Teoh** (1:10)
Yeah, I mean, I'm a football fan. I've been trying to follow it, but without slacking off from work, you know, some of the games are 9 in the morning, 12 p.m. So those are not opportune times to be watching games.

**Zurairi A.R.** (1:22)
I may be like...

**Shannon Teoh** (1:23)
Although if you do, don't tell the bosses, right?

**Zurairi A.R.** (1:25)
Yeah.

**Shannon Teoh** (1:25)
Pretend you need to still watch the highlights later in the day. You know, some of the games, 3 a.m., difficult to stay up and watch those. But I did catch some of the games. I really like the Korea's first game, where they came from behind, back to win, because they were dominating the game. There was this small matter of Lionel Messi scoring a Hendrik, which the guy still got it at this age, right?
And it's interesting because now it's a 48 team who will come instead of 32 A lot more games, a lot more smaller nations involved. You get to see...
I feel like it's a very long tournament. It's been going on for very long, but it gives a chance to a lot of teams that could otherwise not experience a World Cup. But it's also happening at the same time of stuff that we're going to be discussing in this episode. A couple of state elections. So for those of us in Malaysia, we'll have one eye on a contest happening here, another eye happening on a contest in America. So hopefully we don't confuse the two during our coverage.

**Zurairi A.R.** (2:31)
Yeah, I wish they would have shown the World Cup on a big TV, a big screen in our newsroom. Yeah, Francis, how about you?

**Dr Francis Hutchinson** (2:40)
Yeah, so I haven't been following it directly, but I do have two informants that work for me for free, and those are my sons. And so they are avid followers, they've been keeping me up to date. And then to Shannon's point, I've really enjoyed seeing some of the younger, sorry, smaller countries, like Kura-Sao, like Cape Verde. And then I also have a connection to New Zealand, so I was very happy in the first half of the match this morning when they were leading 1-0 against Egypt. But then of course, unfortunately, things took a turn for the worse, and then we lost 3-1.

**Zurairi A.R.** (3:10)
Yeah, well, still got time, I guess? Yes.
Okay, so Francis, before we get into the heavy stuff, I mean, you've been watching Malaysian politics for a long time now. With everything happening at the moment, with the state polls, the SNAP election speculation, I imagine your schedule is probably a little bit hectic. Perhaps you can tell us a bit what are you working on right now in ISEAS? Sure.

**Dr Francis Hutchinson** (3:31)
So I actually just came back from 10 days in Malaysia, and I took an opportunity to visit different parts of the peninsula. So I was in Penang, and then in Alor Star in Kedah, then KL, then JB. I went out by plane, and I took train all the way back. So actually, I can now tell you very happily that the ETS between KL and JB is really good, really, really good.
And when I was in KL last week, we launched our book. So ISIS has a tradition of producing an edited volume on every Malaysian general election going back more than 20 years now.
And my colleague, Lee Hockan, and I, as well as many colleagues in our Malaysian Studies Programme, as well as a range of academics based in Malaysia, produced a book on GE2022 and the state elections in August 2023 Now books take a long time to produce but it's a nice book with lots of maps, illustrations by the famous cartoonist Zunar and a range of other things. And it came out last week just as things are getting panas for the upcoming polls. So I think the timing is quite good.