The 92-year-old comeback kid of Malaysian politics, Mahathir Mohamad, said he had successfully secured a royal pardon for Anwar Ibrahim, the man who had joined him in coalition from the confines of a prison cell.

People were “simply fed up” with the party that had run Malaysia for 61 years, said Joseph Liow Chin Yong, professor of international politics at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies in Singapore.

“But of course, the presence of both Mahathir and Anwar played a role to catalyse things,” he added. “The fact that Mahathir and Anwar reconciled, or so it seems, really fired up the imagination of what Malaysia can achieve in a post-Najib, post-UMNO (former ruling party) era.”