IT IS tempting to interpret the drama of the past week—in which the United Malays National Organisation (UMNO) and its allies, which had run Malaysia for 61 years, crashed from power—as the result of the interaction of three former colleagues in UMNO.
Without the extreme greed of UMNO’s Najib Razak, the fallen prime minister, the country would not have so readily turned against his corrupt and ruthless party. Without the return to politics of the new prime minister, Mahathir Mohamad, the 92-year-old who had dominated UMNO and the country for decades before retiring in 2003, the opposition could not have persuaded so many voters to follow his lead and desert UMNO in the general election on May 9th. And without the quicksilver brilliance of Anwar Ibrahim, who was jailed under Mr Najib on trumped-up sodomy charges but who re-emerged into the limelight on May 16th with a royal pardon, there would have been no momentum for change. Mr Anwar had been planning for this for 20 years.
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