The Kings and I - part II

Assalamualaikum warahmatullah wabarakatuh,

As I said that we will wait and see, now that we see some progress in the monarchy institution, I am very much in respect to the Sultans in Malaysia now.

While I was in school, the Sultanate was described as those rich and comfortably pampered lucky yet mostly poorly-educated people who live in the palace and do nothing good to the people except enjoying themselves and once in a while attend some ritual ceremonies to show up their celebrity-liked faces to the media. However, this post-election drama really proves my stereo-typed perception of the Sultans needs some revisions.

First, solute to the royal family of Perak state for rejecting the initial choice of the Perak Chief Minister by the coalition and decided to choose an engineer (who can speak more than 3 languages used widely in Malaysia) over an ex-postman. Then, solute to the royal family of Perlis state for rejecting the PM's choice of MB and picked someone that is no less than Shahidan to lead the state. And now, solute to the royal family of Terengganu state for rejecting yet another PM's choice of MB and appointed Ahmad who literally has no political support from any of the winning coalition's assemblymen, except one.

Since Malaysia Constitution is what we call Constitutional Monarchy and Parliamentary Democracy or Federal Constitutional Elective Monarchy, whereby the royal family has limited monarchical power and is abide to the democratic election, those who will run the country and states are elected members of Parliament (MPs) and state assemblymen respectively. The royal families will have no say for who will be representing the people in the parliament and state assembly but they have the absolute decision on appointing the Prime Minister and MB. The King or Yang Di-Pertuan Agong (in short, Agong who takes turn to hold the position every 5-year from among all the Sultans of 9 states in Malaysia) have the power to appoint a Prime Minister from among the MPs of the winning coalition while the Sultan of a state will appoint an MB from among the state assemblymen of the winning coalition of the state (refer here and here). Once they have sworn in, they will hold meetings with all the elected members. If they want to reject the choice of the royal families, they will cast votes of not confidence and the royal families will have to appoint another leaders.

This is the constitution, the highest and supreme law of Malaysia. I am not a Malay or pro-sultan/royal-family but I am a Malaysian citizen who wants to follow the constitution. If you don't like it, go to the Parliament, get more than 2/3 of your MPs to vote for a change, suggest a new bill and let's change it. But for the moment, since you are less than 2/3, er... can we just listen to the Kings for this time and if you really want to change the constitution, you either persuade all the MPs or win the next election, ok? Or you can start to learn what is The Constitution of Malaysia rather than ranting the rebellious of the Sultans.

Long live the Kings!?

ALLAHU'alam.

Wassalam.