“Many people feel that Najib has destroyed a lot of what was built for this country,” he said.
“People are calling our leader a fraud. It’s not something I want to perpetuate. We need to go back to the days when we were doing well.
Najib has fired critics of his own government, including the attorney general and deputy prime minister, and muzzled the media since the corruption scandal broke two years ago.
The United States and several other countries are investigating allegations of cross-border embezzlement and money laundering at 1MDB, a sovereign wealth fund previously set up and run by Najib to promote economic development but which has accumulated multibillion-dollar debts.
Najib has denied any wrongdoing.
Many people believe that Najib has destroyed much of what was built for this country
Mahathir has said he does not want to be prime minister again and that his goal is simply to oust Najib and restore Malaysia’s reputation.
He has a busy schedule, crisscrossing the country to speak at political rallies. He has undergone two heart bypass surgeries but shows no signs of slowing down.
Despite speculation that Najib might call elections this year, Mahathir said he believed the elections would be held in 2018 because Najib needed time to strengthen his support in the eastern Borneo states of Sabah and Sarawak.
The two states, bastions of rural Malay support for the ruling National Front coalition, together provided about a quarter of parliamentary seats and helped Najib win the 2013 polls, even though he lost the national popular vote to the opposition for the first time.
“We will gain support on the ground,” Mahathir said.
“We hope to win with a simple majority.”
However, gerrymandering will make it difficult to win more seats than the ruling coalition. Last yr, the Electoral Commission modified electoral boundaries that critics said created more Malay-majority seats to make sure Najib won, although opposition parties are difficult this in court.
“Regardless of our differences in the past, the problem Najib and I face is much bigger. If we don’t get rid of him, we won’t achieve anything,” he said.
Mahathir said he once thought Najib would be admired like his father – Malaysia’s second prime minister Abdul Razak Hussein – but the 1MDB scandal “went from bad to worse.”
This turned the former mentor into Najib’s harshest critic.
Mahathir has often voiced his criticism on his blog Chedet.cc, taken from a nickname given to him as a child by his sisters, and last year he took part in a mass street rally in Kuala Lumpur that called for Najib’s resignation.
Mahathir then formed the Bersatu party with Najib’s former deputy Muhyiddin Yassin, who was fired last year for questioning the prime minister over the scandal.
Even more dramatically, Mahathir this year persuaded his former political nemesis, including opposition icon Anwar Ibrahim, who was imprisoned under his watch, to admit Bersatu into Anwar’s opposition coalition.
Anwar was Mahathir’s deputy until he was fired in a power struggle in 1998 and later jailed on corruption and sodomy charges that Anwar said were trumped up. Anwar was released in 2004 but returned to prison in 2015 after a second sodomy conviction, which critics said was a political plot to break up the opposition.
Mahathir’s return is a strengthening for the opposition plagued by internal fighting. His popularity among ethnic Malays may also make the opposition more palatable to those voters who form the backbone of Najib’s ruling coalition.
Recently, the alliance announced that it will run in the elections under one logo and will have a common constitution.
Mahathir said there was deep anger among urban voters, and while the rural poor may not have felt affected by the graft scandal, they were concerned about the higher cost of living, which is partly due to an unpopular goods and services tax.
“This country has the potential to become a fully developed country if the right policies and plans are followed,” he said.
But under Najib, “we risk becoming a bankrupt country, a failed country.”
This article appeared within the print edition of the South China Morning Post as: Mahathir says the opposition can win the poll
