Malaysia’s Deputy Prime Minister Najib Razak, the son of one premier and the nephew of another, will get his shot at running the country in March after Abdullah Ahmad Badawi said he would step down.Abdullah told a press conference on Wednesday that he would not stand for re-election as president of the United Malays National Organisation, the main party in the ruling coalition, a post that traditionally also carries the country’s premiership.He hands over at a time when Malaysia’s opposition, led by former Deputy Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim, is at its strongest; when economic growth is set to fall dramatically and when the coalition that has ruled since independence in 1957 is divided.“I know that I was not doing well enough during the (March) election so it’s time for someone else to take over,” Abdullah said when asked whether he was forced out of office.Abdullah’s tenure as prime minister will go down as the shortest in Malaysia’s 51-year history, having succeeded Mahathir Mohamad, the longest-serving premier.But having failed to erase the traces of cronyism and corruption that he pledged to tackle when he was appointed, the 68-year old premier, known as “Mr Nice Guy”, turned a landslide election victory in 2004 into the coalition’s worst ever result in polls in March this year.Abdullah said, however, that in his remaining six months in office he would enact laws to clean up judicial appointments and deal with corruption.Analysts said that Najib, 55, would have a hard time uniting the Barisan Nasional coalition.One UMNO official has already said he will stand against Najib, although the deputy premier is expected to win.“Najib lacks the imagination and the drive to make UMNO a ‘sexy’ party, as it were. The same goes for most UMNO leaders today. None is convincing as a force for the future,” said Ooi Kee Beng, a Malaysia expert at the Institute of South East Asian Studies in Singapore.
