ONE of the aims of the MP Watch: Eye on Parliament project was to find out and highlight the challenges that Malaysian Members of Parliament (MPs) face, and explore how these might affect how effectively they play their roles. Even though many MPs understood that their function was to be lawmakers, MPs from both the [...]

THE Barisan Nasional government has been making a lot of promises as a decisive general election looms. Of all the promises the Umno-led coalition has made, which should citizens be most concerned about?

DATUK Saifuddin Abdullah says he’s a reluctant politician who got into politics because he wanted to affect change. The Umno supreme council member and first-time MP is seen as being a minority voice of reform within his party and wishes his party was more “progressive”. In this interview, Saifuddin traces his family lineage and student activism, explains the dynamics within Umno, and wishes there was more space at the Malaysian table for space and ideas.

2011 is going by in a flash, and yet it has felt long and intense. The political temperature has been kept on the high side, first with the Sarawak elections, then the Bersih 2.0 rally, endless speculation about the next general election, and most recently, inter-religious tensions involving allegations against Christians. Malaysians certainly have had [...]

The Bersih 2.0 9 July 2011 march drew thousands of Malaysians onto Kuala Lumpur’s streets to call for clean and fair elections. But according to Barisan Nasional (BN) leaders, the government-controlled press and the authorities, that’s not what the march was really about. In the aftermath of the Bersih march, The Nut Graph summarises some of the more popular theories by Bersih’s detractors of why it actually organised the march.

TEMERLOH Member of Parliament (MP) Datuk Saifuddin Abdullah’s response to the MP Watch: Eye on Parliament project, which asks all 222 MPs six questions. Name: Saifuddin Abdullah; constituency: Temerloh [...]