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| Southeast Asia |
| Anwar wins big in Malaysia by-election |
| 2008-08-27 |
| Malaysia's opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim has scored a big victory in a key Malaysian by-election on Tuesday, enabling the country's best known politician to challenge for power. The ruling coalition, meanwhile, declared defeat against Ibrahim who will return to parliament after a decade-long absence. "Yes of course we have lost... we were the underdogs going into this race," said Muhammad Muhammad Taib, information chief of the United Malays National Organization (UMNO) which leads the Barisan Nasional coalition. Anwar's Keadilan party, which leads a three-member opposition alliance, claimed a "landslide" victory. It said Anwar had garnered at least 65 percent of the ballot and that the figure could rise as high as 70 percent. "We declare victory, the margin is very huge," said Keadilan information chief Tian Chua. Muhammad said UMNO had been hampered by internal disagreement over the choice of its candidate in the by-election, Arif Shah Omah Shah, and was distracted by upcoming internal leadership polls. "There are factors that we have to be practical about but this does not mean that he is enjoying full support elsewhere in the country," he told AFP. Anwar, whose campaign to win the seat vacated by his wife has been dogged by new charges of sodomy, has said he will start talks with MPs from the governing coalition to initiate a confidence vote to topple the government. Victory had been widely predicted for the man who was once deputy prime minister and seemed destined to become UMNO leader and prime minister. Anwar's meteoric rise to power ended abruptly when he was imprisoned in the late 1990s on what he says were trumped up sodomy and corruption charges. Anwar denies the new sodomy charges made by a 23-year old male aide and says if he wins power he will sweep away economic and social privileges for ethnic Malays in education and the civil service, policies he endorsed when in power. |
| Posted by:Fred |