ABSTRACT

Malaysia’s 13th general election (henceforth, GE13) in 2013 was the final election where the longest-serving elected government in the world, Barisan Nasional (BN), regained power, before it was ousted after over six decades of authoritarian rule in 2018. In a country that practises parliamentary democracy but simultaneously observed close cooperation between the then ruling coalition and the mainstream press, this paper shows the micro-politics of the driving force of the coalition, United Malays National Organisation (UMNO) – specifically, how anxiety regarding the maintenance of their privileged and empowered Malay position dominated the national narrative during the GE13 campaign. Focusing on editorial journalistic genres in four paid-for Malay-language newspapers, I illustrate the typical politics of fear that characterises much of Malaysian right-wing rhetoric – the ways in which racial and religion issues are provoked. The in-depth representational analysis, via the Discourse-historical Approach’s (DHA) nomination and predication strategies, also suggests the normalisation of nationalistic and racist rhetoric, which primarily works with ‘fear’: fear of change, of loss of privilege, of the future, of other races; in principle, almost anything can be constructed as a threat to ‘Us’, an imagined homogenous people inside a well-protected territory through the discursive construction of such in-groups and out-groups.

摘要

马来西亚在 2013 年举行的第 13 届大选（此后称为 GE13）是世界上任职时间最长的民选政府国阵（BN）在 2018 年经过 60 多年的专制统治后重新掌权的最后一次选举。一个实行议会民主但同时观察到当时执政联盟与主流媒体之间密切合​​作的国家，本文展示了微观政治联盟的驱动力，联合马来民族组织（UMNO）——特别是，在第 13 届大选期间，对维护马来人特权和赋权地位的焦虑如何主导了民族叙事。专注于四份付费马来语报纸的社论新闻类型，我说明了典型的恐惧政治这是马来西亚右翼言论的主要特征——种族和宗教问题的引发方式。通过话语历史方法 (DHA) 的提名和预测策略进行的深入表征分析也表明民族主义和种族主义言论的正常化，这主要与“恐惧”有关：害怕改变、失去特权、其他种族的未来；原则上，几乎任何东西都可以被构建为对“我们”的威胁，通过这种内群体和外群体的话语建构，我们是一个受保护的领土内想象中的同质人。