And what a poll it was on March 21. The result was barely surprising, including the whitewash by the ruling Barisan Nasional (BN) of its key opponents who, for the most part, have only themselves to blame. Their obduracy, internal bickering, the many false starts at mergers and cross-ballot support, all contributed to their shameful but deserved crushing defeat. So what has changed in Malaysia? Effectively, nothing. What could change in Malaysia? Almost assuredly nothing, either.

Every one of the opposition parties lacked vision. All lacked credible counter policies. And all were hamstrung by their own incompetence. Against that kind of defeat, it'll be a hundred times harder for the opposition to pick up the pieces - what's left of them - and return to become a better mainstream opposition force. But they'll have to overcome the credibility gap first. Not that one doesn't exist in the BN. More importantly, however, each opposition party will have to reconstitute itself by attracting new blood and by becoming much more imaginative, more intelligent, and much more transparent in hammering out its policies and in its policy responses to the state's. Nothing less will do.

That's not something any Malaysian saw or heard in the shortest campaign on record. Well done to premier Abdullah Ahmad Badawi who called the snap poll and gave the opposition short shrift. I had warned earlier that Abdullah is wily and desperate. He proved me right. But there's no denying that Abdullah caught the opposition on the hop, even if the election result was mostly the work of extensive manipulation of political boundaries and other electoral frauds by the ruling coalition, with 'complete compliance' from the incompetent Election Commission (EC).

Asset declaration

But surely this was something the opposition parties knew all along, knew it would happen. Plainly, they were caught out. They were also caught between crying foul and anxious to air their policies, but that's largely their fault. Though, to be fair, they also faced serious obstacles. For one thing, the EC had its instructions from the ruling coalition, chiefly Umno, the dominant party which Abdullah rules. For another, the mainstream media, hardly worth its salt, would have either blacked out or cast negatively the opposition's campaign rhetoric. Of course it wouldn't dare do this of its political masters - not when their precious printing licenses are worth what their major shareholders dictate.

The DAP may have fared better than the other opposition parties - relatively speaking. But the retention of autocrats like Lim Kit Siang and his trusted lieutenant Karpal Singh, both of whom are past their use-by dates, and with both retaining their parliamentary seats, comes as little if any consolation for an opposition party that is still seemingly happy to bark at the government for the sake of barking. No different of other opposition parties either, including PAS, and Parti Keadilan Rakyat (Keadilan).

Take the most recent farce over the challenge to government MPs to declare their wealth assets, which was met with counter challenges from the coalition's MPs for the opposition to do the same, only first. All that this demonstrates is the inanity of Malaysian politics, as Malaysian voters again take a back seat to such shenanigans even after voting the way that they did - overwhelmingly, apparently, for the BN. Strange behaviour, indeed. But then, after almost 47 years of independence, Malaysian political minds haven't matured - at all. It still amounts to village level politics, feudal at best.

That's not surprising, given the inherent third world mentality among Malaysian politicians who'll resist change, unless it directly affects them financially and politically. There's a deeply symbiotic relationship between political power and influence and amassing personal wealth. That is why the debate on asset declaration has taken a farcical turn, why both sides of politics are reluctant to come clean, and why Malaysian voters won't ever take Malaysian politicians seriously. Everyone sees them as dishonest and selfish, serving their personal agendas first than the nation. It's also why Malaysians think their politicians are among the most corrupt in a country so famous as much for its embedded corruption as for state-backed racism.

Forget the opposition? Only at Malaysia's peril, for Malaysia now faces its darkest hour. Western journalists writing on the recent poll almost unanimously, and in their usual naive tripe, declared a paradigm shift in Malaysian politics just because Abdullah and the BN romped home with the biggest margin. Which will have left former premier Dr Mahathir Mohamad severely embarrassed for not being able to pull off the same when he ruled Malaysia.

That doesn't mean Abdullah's style of politics won't be the same despite the mainstream media incessantly portraying him as 'Mr Nice Guy' for his non-combative, accommodative style, his incorruptible image, his soft Islamic scholar credentials, his reformist zeal and all the rest of it. It's as though the longer and more frequently the media keeps Abdullah on a plinth, as it did Mahathir, the more true Malaysian political truth becomes. In Malaysian politics lies and deception possess moral virtues, and whenever Malaysian leadership is presented as pragmatist.

Deliberate strategy

The strategy is deliberate, one aimed at winning the hearts and minds of Malaysian voters. Yet it's unclear if that is just what has happened. Even the best statistician will be hard pressed to differentiate between mass voter support for the ruling coalition and gerrymandering and the like for the election result. And that's just the problem: with such a massive win, and having rubbed out the opposition with contempt, who will now keep them honest?

That's already clear since the poll. The opposition is missing in action, probably still licking its self-inflicted big wounds. Whatever political depth the opposition had, if at all, it has been thoroughly plundered by BN, however unfairly.

Still, Abdullah has yet to weigh into the debate on MPs wealth asset declaration. That's if he does at all. Without an effective opposition, Abdullah needn't worry now; he may even scoff at the idea as being entirely ludicrous to begin with. If this happens, surmise from it that Abdullah was merely ranting his populist creed for popular consumption all along. And it worked: Malaysians bought his spiel hook, line and sinker.

So what of Abdullah's promise to weed out corruption? That has stopped dead in its tracks after the arrest and indictment of two utterly unimportant 'VIPs' 'VIPs' being the mainstream media's spin. And his new cabinet? Even with some new faces, and creating some new ministries, it looks like Abdullah believes in a big government, as Mahathir did, big spending programmes, which will do the nation's fiscal deficit problem - already at 6% of GDP and sure to edge up a whole lot of good. Worse, it's a cabinet of ministries still loaded with Mahathir's men that'll duplicate other ministries.

So much for ingenuity and paradigm change in Malaysian politics.

More amazing, though, is that at no time during the election campaign did Abdullah announce new policies, enunciate his reform agenda, how he would rid the nation of endemic corruption, fix the untrustworthy judiciary and police, whether he'll dismantle or reconstitute Malaysian Inc, wherein much of cronyism is bred and promoted among corporate businessmen linked to the ruling coalition and individual politicians, and how he will refashion the politics of race and institutionalised racism which affect every aspect of social life in Malaysia.

This much is clear, and I won't resile from any of the things I've written on the political transition late last October, since or even earlier: few if any of Mahathir's policies will change under Abdullah, including ongoing state repression of political dissidence. The premier has said at least as much. Abdullah is now also internal security minister; it sounds more ominous, more sinister than the anti-democratic Ministry of Home Affairs. This is Orwellian Malaysia.

No doubt the Internal Security Ministry is designed to rub out Islamic fascists while pacifying the United States in its war on transnational terrorism. That doesn't however deflect attention from the fact that Mahathir's policies have a lot to blame for the kinds of problems that persist in Malaysia, which will continue into the medium but probably the long term. But also don't expect any new policy pronouncements, if any, until after the Umno polls mid year. That's the one that really counts in Malaysia, not the polls that Malaysians have just had and by which they have been had.

MANJIT BHATIA, an academic and writer, is also research director of AsiaRisk, a political, economic and risk analysis consultancy in Australia. He specialises in international economics and politics, with a focus on the Asia-Pacific.