New premier Abdullah Ahmad Badawi took his time picking his deputy when his former boss Dr Mahathir Mohamad had decided that earlier in a political deal on leadership change.

But Abdullah didn't keep Malaysians guessing long on the next federal election. Even with only eight days campaigning and fuzziness over the ruling coalition Barisan Nasional's line-up for the March 21 poll, euphoria among Malaysians of an enlightened new regime descending on post-Mahathir Malaysia has swirled. No brainer who'll win the election. But is real change in Malaysia a dead certainty?Short answer: not by a long shot.

'Nice guy' Abdullah is wily and desperate. On becoming premier last October, Abdullah unleashed thespian rhetoric and actions that Malaysia's state-controlled media suggest have captured Malaysian political consciousness in ways Mahathir hadn't after losing huge Malay-Muslim votes to the opposition PAS in 1999.

Non-Malay voters who feared PAS's Islamic fundamentalist agenda saved Mahathir's neck. Yet Abdullah, keen to exorcise Mahathir's festering legacy of recklessness and dishonesty, has adopted Mahathirist populism to win legitimacy.

The acts

Act one: Abdullah, like a true democrat, pledges to govern for the people. Like Mahathir, Abdullah asks Malaysians to work with him, not for him. And he asks them to always tell him the truth. Act two: Abdullah shows he means what he says. He shelves two crony-tempered mega projects Mahathir had started. And while calling for a review of the corrupt police force, Abdullah nabs two petty 'VIPs' whom he's hauling before a fishy judiciary on corruption charges. Act three: By now Abdullah has proved his actions speak louder than words, even claiming the Anti-Corruption Agency, answerable to him, is free from political interference to catch other corrupt VIPs.

Malaysians are bowled over by this extraordinary performance.

But most of these VIPs occupy senior places in Abdullah's government, as they had Mahathir's. And, cutting across ethnic lines, they fill the corporate sector. Amid Malaysia's robber-baron capitalism, corporate malfeasance flourished under Mahathir. They form the dominant class, vastly benefiting from state largesse and protection from international competition. Plus they wield strong influence within BN. They'll deter Abdullah from pursuing his anti-graft crusade. Nothing since Abdullah's ascension even remotely suggests state-society dynamics have seen a sea change.

Why then did Abdullah move swiftly to defer not cancel two Mahathir-approved crony projects, and then arrest two ineffectual people for corruption and fraud? One was land and cooperative development minister Kasitah Gaddam who, so low ranked, still posted RM1 million bail. And Eric Chia, who had headed the spectacularly unprofitable state-owned steel company Perwaja, was a long-time Mahathir crony whom the regime had shielded from indictment.

Yet, given Malaysia's infamy for widespread corruption, further arrests have suddenly dried up. Abdullah claims 18 other cases are under ACA review, but most have been for two decades. Hard to believe, in Malaysia's surveillance state, Abdullah's claims he hadn't a clue if his son's firm Scomi had made parts for Libya's nuclear programme. (Eds note: The company has since been cleared of any wrongdoing)

Umno elections

Clearly Abdullah's theatrics were calculated to win him the poll by the biggest margin, thus consigning Mahathir more into oblivion. But his media-abetted populism is designed to bolster his position ahead of the more crucial and cutthroat Umno party elections mid year. Abdullah won't be directly challenged then but Mahathir loyalists who have most to lose from Abdullah's anti-corruption drive may undermine his position until it is untenable, as Mahathir did to third premier Hussein Onn. Which explains why overt support from within Abdullah's cabinet and government for his anti-graft campaign has remained muted.

Indeed, Abdullah hasn't even demanded that senior government people publicly declare their financial assets. He won't because his hands are tied by Mahathir's nefarious legacy. There's been no regime change in Malaysia since Mahathir's exit, and there won't be one for a few more generations, if at all. Useless world records that won't lift many Malaysians out of the poverty trap aside, Mahathir has bred in Malaysians a Malaysia Boleh ideology of abhorrently pretentious grandiosity, self-delusion, a culture of denial, an insidious inward-looking nationalism carved in racism and distortion of history, a deteriorating education system that, effectively, has dumbed-down Malaysians, and, worse, institutionalised fear among Malaysians of Stalinist-type state power.

Since the 1969 race riots, Malaysians have bequeathed the embedding of a Malay-Umno dirigiste (controlled by central authority) state whose power Abdullah will be loathed to reconfigure towards democracy. That's because unlike Mahathir, Abdullah needs Umno. But feudalist Umno doesn't need Abdullah now that Mahathir's point man Najib Abdul Razak has been made deputy premier, thanks to Mahathir loyalists in key Umno positions and elsewhere.

Malaysia under Abdullah will only change if the institutions of coercion are purged for real reforms. But, like Japan, faced with entrenched institutional impediments and other structural imbalances, reformists can't win against feudalists. And like Fiji, Malaysia will stay perennially riven by racial and class conflict. Easy to blame all this on British colonialism when, really, they're the products of post-1969 political economy, which also form the bedrock of regime survival, whatever Abdullah's servile offers for democratic regime change.

Will Abdullah's coalition win the poll? Definitely thanks mostly to a sturdily recovering economy, money politics, gerrymandering and absence of a credible alternative. And if Malaysians should later whine about lost opportunities for real reforms, they'll have only their own intransigence to blame for regime recalcitrance. Because the old regime has them right where it wants them.

MANJIT BHATIA is managing director of AsiaRisk - a political and economic research and risk analysis consultancy in Australia. The writer specialises in international economics and politics and the Asia-Pacific region.