Death of Mahathir's wife severs Malaysia's last bridge between feuding leaders

On the morning of September 28, Malaysia's longest-serving prime minister sat in a wheelchair with an oxygen tube and wept. Mahathir Mohamad, now 101, watched his wife of 70 years lowered into the ground in Putrajaya. Dr Hasmah Mohd Ali had died that same morning, aged 100. Three days later, he returned to her grave alone, scattering rose petals and crying again.

Tenderness was not the quality most associated with Mahathir during his decades in power. He was the leader whose critics called him authoritarian, the neighbour who sparred over water and bridges. Yet his marriage to Hasmah, who became one of the first Malay women doctors and spent her career in maternal and child health, remained untouched by scandal. They had met in 1947 as medical students in Singapore.

What made the funeral more than a family's grief was the presence of Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim. Anwar had once been Mahathir's deputy and chosen heir. In 1998, Mahathir sacked him, and Anwar was jailed on charges he has always called political. Twenty years later, the two joined forces to win the 2018 election, ending six decades of rule by the same coalition. Mahathir promised to hand over power. He never did. The government collapsed in 2020. Since Anwar took office in 2022, Mahathir has sued him for defamation, accused him of seeking revenge as anti-corruption investigators examined his sons, and called for his resignation. Southeast Asia has other long rivalries, but none conducted so publicly for so long.

Yet at the funeral, Anwar interrupted his own speech to announce Hasmah's death and lead a prayer. He ordered a state funeral. He came with his wife, Dr Wan Azizah Wan Ismail, shook Mahathir's hand, and wrote afterwards of Hasmah as a maternal figure and a friend. The family received them. None of this was improvised. The two sides were bound before politics divided them: Hasmah's elder sister had helped arrange Anwar's marriage to Wan Azizah. When the men were enemies, the women were not. Anwar said in 2018 that he had found it hard to let go of the past, and that watching the two wives get along was what compelled him to move on.

In Malaysia, political parties are built around individual leaders more than ideas. When official channels between rival camps shut down, personal friendships like this one are what keep them talking. But such friendships are informal, answer to no one, and last only as long as the people in them. The 2018 victory is usually explained by public anger over the 1MDB corruption scandal and by Mahathir's pull with rural Malay voters. It also depended on a friendship between two doctors that survived what their husbands did to each other.

With Hasmah gone, one of the few bridges between the two camps has gone too. This comes at a time when Malay voters are split among several parties, and an election is due by early 2028. The risk is not that the two men start fighting again, because they never stopped. It is that their successors inherit the grudge without the friendship that kept it in check. In this region, leaders who lose power are more often jailed, driven abroad, or written out of history. So when a prime minister publicly honours the family of his harshest critic, he sets an example that other leaders can be measured against.

Mahathir is frail. He was admitted for observation the day after the funeral, though his daughter says he is healthy but lonely. There is still time for a plain accounting of 1998 and 2020, in their own words. Malaysia would gain more from that than from another photograph, and it need not end in an alliance. Hasmah kept the possibility alive through most of their quarrel, and it should not be buried with her.