The Rhetoric and Language of Mohammad Najib Abdul Razak: A Political Analysis

Abstract

This paper offers an in-depth political analysis of the rhetoric and the speech of Mohammad Najib Abdul Razak, the 6th and Prime Minister of Malaysia, between 2010 and 2015. Utilizing a qualitative cross-sectional exploratory design within a theory developed by Halliday and Hasan, this study analyzes the political narratives of Najib as performative texts. The focus of this analysis is to determine the political words and rhetorical strategies Najib used in the ethnically diverse and politically complicated Malaysia. The analysis points to a major, bipolar concentration in Najib’s rhetoric. It consisted in the ‘modern’ projection of the audience and the ‘diverse’, ‘multilingual’ communicator and the simultaneous, counter ‘Malay dominance/backlash’ discourse. His political discourse annexes massive audiences. This study also focuses on Najib’s boundaries on ‘we’ as ‘kita’, which is ‘inclusive’ analogy in disengagements, disproportionate and contradictory arguments on ethno-national justifiable simplification of argumentative strategies. It reflects the ideology which is covered by political discourse in Malaysia and the dominance in the geopolitics of the region. Finally, this text analyzes how Najib’s rhetoric how state translation and the media as Surrogates of Najib’s rhetorical and institutional control. In the end, the author suggests that Najib's rhetoric was highly crafted political technology that, instead of solving, kept a lid on the basic tensions of the Malaysian society. His eventual political demise, then, is to be taken as marking not the defeat of this rhetorical model, but rather the most profound fracture of the fragile balance that model was intended to preserve. This dissertation offers a new perspective on the intersection of political linguistics and Malaysian Studies by demonstrating how, in a critical period of the country’s history, language was deployed as a key instrument of power.