Welcome to Foreign Policy’s Southeast Asia Brief.
The highlights this week: An election in east Malaysia shakes the government, Myanmar grants clemency to thousands of political prisoners, floods once again batter the region, and Jakarta is named the world’s biggest megalopolis.
East Malaysia Elections Pressure the Government
Elections that were held in the Malaysian state of Sabah on Nov. 29 have delivered a blow to Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim.
Localist parties of various persuasions swept the election in the Bornean state, raising wider questions about the country’s precarious ethno-political balance.
While the local parties all support Anwar at a federal level, the arrangement is a quid pro quo based mainly on the central government’s support for greater autonomy for Sabah. Sabah-centric parties now control 82 percent of the state parliament. Meanwhile, so-called peninsular parties—with a power base on Malaysia’s more populous mainland—saw their vote shares collapse.
With general elections due in 2028 at the latest, the Sabah election was viewed by many as a test for the federal government. Anwar inserted himself into the campaign, banking on a success would help further cement his authority.
In the end, the mainland government and opposition parties fared poorly, winning only one seat apiece.
The results reflect a strong streak of the “Sabah for Sabahans” sentiment that characterized the campaign. Sabah and the larger Sarawak, the other Malaysian state on the island of Borneo, have long marched to a different drum from the rest of the country. Encompassing the northern coast of Borneo, they are separated from the Malaysian Peninsula by the ocean, resulting in a distinct history that saw them join Malaysia in 1963, six years after the country gained independence, as well as a distinct ethnic makeup. To this day, mainland Malaysians traveling to East Malaysia are subject to immigration controls and don’t have an automatic right to reside there.
Residents of East Malaysia have also long felt marginalized by a peninsula that dominates national politics and benefits from the east’s enormous natural resources wealth. Sabah has the highest poverty rate of any Malaysian state.
However, in recent years, both eastern states have started to flex their muscles. The fall in 2018 of Barisan Nasional, a coalition that had led Malaysia for decades, ushered in a period of political instability. East Malaysian parties often found themselves holding the balance of power. Without their support, the current federal government would have a bare majority of seven seats in parliament.
In Sabah, the main issue has been a demand for a massive payout. The Malaysian Constitution guarantees Sabah a 40 percent share of a federal revenue collected in the state, but this was ignored from 1974-2021. In October of this year, courts ruled that the government owed Sabah decades of back revenue. Despite the massive fiscal cost, the government declined to appeal the judgement for fear of alienating Sabahan opinion.
Sarawak has been even bolder in recent times, setting up a state oil company and plotting to take over policy areas such as health and education.
More may follow. In 2021, the two states secured a constitutional amendment strengthening their special status. The next step may be pushing an amendment guaranteeing the two states 35 percent of seats in the federal parliament. In recent years, the federal government has kept pro-independence voices marginalized by making concessions. How far will the government go before it feels that it has to say no?
Myanmar frees political prisoners. The Myanmar junta granted clemency to almost 10,000 people who have been either locked up or facing prosecution on political charges as part of a mass amnesty announced on Nov. 27. The government granted amnesty to about 3,085 prisoners, conditional releases to 724 prisoners, and dropped charges against another more than 5,500 people who were either being prosecuted or in hiding, according to state-run broadcaster MRTV.
The move was explained as intended to ensure that eligible voters could participate in elections scheduled for Dec. 28, which have been widely denounced as a sham. All those benefiting from this announcement had previously been charged under the so-called incitement law, which bans comments that create public unrest and fear—and has been widely used to arrest government critics. Prior to the mass clemency, Myanmar had some 22,000 political detainees in jail, according to the Assistance Association for Political Prisoners.
At this stage, it does not look like Aung San Suu Kyi, a former state counsellor and leading opposition figure, will be released. One figure who has already been released is Kyi Toe, a senior member of Aung San’s National League for Democracy party.
Mass amnesties of this sort are not unusual. Earlier this year, the junta pardoned 4,893 prisoners to mark the traditional new year on April 17. Those released then included some political prisoners, such as a film director and a journalist.
Floods batter Thailand, Malaysia, and Indonesia. Floods are once again engulfing Southeast Asia, leaving some 604 people confirmed dead at time of writing. Areas of southern Thailand saw the heaviest recorded rainfall in 300 years, leaving at least 162 dead and affecting more than 3.8 million people. Across the Malacca Strait in Sumatra, Indonesia, floods killed at least 442 people and affected 1.1 million people. Malaysia saw some 34,000 people forced to evacuate, mostly in the northern peninsular region that borders Thailand—thankfully with no casualties reported.
Meteorologists have suggested that the weather conditions could have been exacerbated by the interaction between two weather patterns, La Niña in the Pacific Ocean and the Indian Ocean Dipole. The former cools the central Pacific, which can strengthen monsoons in Southeast Asia—and has lingered unusually long this year. The latter weather phenomenon is in a phase that creates warmer-than-average sea temperatures in the Indian Ocean near Indonesia. This takes place against the backdrop of climate change, too, which has resulted in unusually warm sea surface temperatures in the region.
In Thailand, there is considerable popular anger directed at Prime Minister Anutin Charnvirakul over his perceived botched handling of the extreme weather. With an election scheduled soon, some analysts whom I’ve spoken to suggest that this could derail his ambitions.
Vietnam rows back bike ban for capital. Vietnam’s capital, Hanoi, will restrict where petrol-powered motorcycles can drive in the city next year. Large areas of the city center have been designated as low-emissions zones. The government has said the measures are aimed at reducing air pollution in a city that has repeatedly topped global air pollution charts.
The move, however, fell short of what many had expected. The government had previously signaled that it was contemplating a full ban. The prospect of a full ban had caused concern among commuters and businesses alike. Sales of electric two-wheelers have climbed fast, making Vietnam the world’s third-largest market for them, after China and India. However, electric bikes still only account for about 12 percent of sales. For now, the lion’s share of the 77 million motorbikes on Vietnam’s roads remain powered by fossil fuels.
Mahouts and elephants march to pay respect to the Queen Mother Sirikit outside the Royal Grand Palace in Bangkok, Thailand, on Nov. 27.
Mahouts and elephants march to pay respect to the Queen Mother Sirikit outside the Royal Grand Palace in Bangkok, Thailand, on Nov. 27.Peerapon Boonyakiat/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images
Thailand’s Queen Mother Sirikit died at the age of 93 on Oct. 24 at the Chulalongkorn Hospital. Eleven elephants were daubed in pink paint to resemble auspicious white elephants and travelled from Ayutthaya Elephant Palace to Bangkok.
Indonesia’s capital, Jakarta, has moved to ban the slaughter and consumption of dogs, according to a piece in the Straits Times.
In Foreign Policy, Jack Adamóvic Davies digs into whether, in the light of new U.S. sanctions, Cambodia’s scam industry is too big to fail.
A rare piece of front-line reporting on the impact of the recent floods in Vietnam was smuggled out in the form of an opinion piece. Le Phong writes about what he saw in Hoa Xuan Commune in central Vietnam for VnExpress.
In Focus: Jakarta, the World’s Megalopolis
Jakarta is now the world’s biggest city, with 41.9 million inhabitants, according to the U.N. Department of Economic and Social Affairs, which just released its 2025 World Urbanization Prospects report. While only 12 million people live inside the city’s official borders, Indonesia’s capital has long spread messily into neighboring provinces. The urban sprawl is referred to colloquially as Jabodetabek—a portmanteau of Jakarta plus the various cities it has absorbed as commuter areas, including Bogor, Depok, Tangerang, and Bekasi.
Jakarta on its own has a larger population than the national population of more than half of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations’ member states. It also accounts for about 14.7 percent of Indonesia’s population. Its predominance looks unchallenged. Between 2000 and 2025, the city grew at a faster rate than the two other Indonesian urban centers with populations of more than 5 million, Bandung and Surabaya.
With the scale comes a degree of dysfunction. Traffic and pollution are obvious. And climate change plus the widespread pumping of groundwater mean that parts of the north of the city are sinking into the sea.
Worries about these challenges mean that Jakarta’s expansion has historically taken place despite the efforts of the government to stop it. Until about 2000, the government relocated millions of people from the crowded island of Java—where Jakarta is situated—to the less densely populated islands of Sumatra, Borneo, Sulawesi, and Papua. A desire to control Jakarta’s expansion was a factor, alongside other aims such as a push for more workers in remote areas, anti-poverty programs, and the desire to cement control of remote hinterlands.
Meanwhile, the government has consistently tried to limit movement to Jakarta. Under former President Suharto, the government tried to ban unemployed migrants from coming to the city. More recently, the government planned to relocate the capital to try to take some of the pressure off. But with the new capital project floundering, the relentless rise of Jakarta looks set to continue.
