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Ushar Daniele

Iman Muttaqin Yusof

When Malaysian artist Darwisy Mustafani received a commission to paint the country’s king and queen, he did not reach for an ordinary canvas.
Instead, the 25-year-old from the northeastern city of Kota Bharu transformed songket – the lustrous handwoven fabric once reserved for Malay courts and ceremonial dress – into a portrait of the sultan and his wife before a golden-domed palace.
The portrait, commissioned in 2024 by Malaysia’s police force as a gift for Sultan Ibrahim Iskandar and Queen Raja Zarith Sofiah, opened a door Darwisy had never expected. Further royal commissions followed, including work linked to other Malaysian palaces and Brunei’s royal household.
“My focus has never been about painting royal figures simply because they are royal,” he told This Week in Asia. “I never planned for my work to become closely associated with royalty, but I’m grateful that it has opened the door for me to share Malaysian culture with a wider audience.”
On TikTok, viewers watch Darwisy layer paint over woven gold thread, gradually revealing royal faces against patterns that carry centuries of courtly history. Many of those following the process are young Malaysians encountering the monarchy not through a constitutional textbook or palace ceremony, but through an algorithm.
“They first discover my work because they enjoy watching the creative process,” he said. “Then they become curious about the story behind the artwork and the cultural meaning of the materials.”
That curiosity is growing at a moment when Malaysia’s royal institutions have become increasingly visible far beyond ceremonial life.

Since the country’s first transfer of federal power in 2018 shattered six decades of rule by one coalition, Malaysia has endured collapsing alliances, three prime ministers in less than three years, shifting parliamentary majorities and its first hung federal parliament.
Those ruptures repeatedly placed decisions about government formation before the king, drawing greater public attention to powers that had long existed in the constitution but were rarely exercised under the stable, dominant-party politics of an earlier era.
The result is not an absolute monarchy supplanting parliamentary democracy, constitutional experts say, but an old institution operating under new political conditions.
“The rulers tend always to have been influential players,” Anthony Crothers Milner, an Australian historian of Southeast Asia who has written extensively on Malay political culture, told This Week in Asia. “From time to time one reads that the rulers have suddenly gained power, but, in fact, they tend always to have been influential players.”
What has changed is the political landscape around them, according to Milner.
Broken majorities
Malaysia has one of the world’s most unusual constitutional arrangements. Nine of its 13 states are headed by hereditary Malay rulers, who elect one among themselves as the Yang di-Pertuan Agong, or king, for a five-year term through a secret ballot conducted by the Conference of Rulers.
The other four states, Penang, Melaka, Sabah and Sarawak, have appointed governors and do not take part in choosing the federal monarch.
Executive authority is exercised by the elected government, while the king generally acts on ministerial advice. The constitution nevertheless grants the monarch limited discretionary authority, most notably in appointing as prime minister the lawmaker whom he believes commands the confidence of parliament’s majority and in withholding consent to a request to dissolve parliament.
For decades, those reserve powers attracted little public attention because the governing coalition normally arrived at the palace with a clear majority.

That changed in February 2020, when Mahathir Mohamad’s resignation brought down the Pakatan Harapan (PH) government and sparked a sequence of royal consultations with lawmakers and party leaders to determine who commanded sufficient parliamentary support.
The constitutional machinery was tested again after the November 2022 general election produced no outright winner. Then king Sultan Abdullah Sultan Ahmad Shah interviewed political leaders and urged rival coalitions to consider a unity government before appointing Anwar Ibrahim as prime minister.
Azmi Hassan, a senior fellow at the Nusantara Academy for Strategic Research, said the monarchy’s role was not new, but had become more conspicuous. “Previously, much of it was done behind closed doors and in a very discreet manner,” he said.
Without a resolution, Malaysia might have returned to another election and produced another inconclusive result, Azmi said. “In that sense, the nation has looked to the monarchy as a stabilising institution.”
Constitutional lawyer Lim Wei Jiet said weaker parties and unstable coalitions had created greater room for royal institutions to influence the course of government formation.
“When political parties are not as strong as they used to be, the monarchs invariably fill that power vacuum and play a much more influential role in governance, at least compared to pre-2018,” he said.

The monarchy’s higher profile has continued under Sultan Ibrahim, the Johor ruler who began his five-year federal reign in January 2024.
In April, the king said he would determine the best candidate to lead the Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission after the incumbent’s term ended, while warning that the appointment should not be politicised. Under the constitution, the commission’s chief is appointed by the king on the prime minister’s advice.
Such episodes have prompted renewed debate over how convention, written law and royal influence intersect, particularly when the constitution vests formal authority in the monarch but requires most decisions to follow government advice.
Wan Ahmad Fauzi Wan Husain, a Malaysian constitutional scholar specialising in the monarchy, said the institution should not be interpreted solely through the conventions of Britain’s Westminster system, which shaped Malaya’s colonial administration before independence in 1957.
“Our monarchy does not mirror Westminster,” he said. “It is rooted in the Great Malay Melaka Sultanate.”
He argued that the rulers retained constitutional prerogatives inherited from the pre-colonial Malay states and were obliged to safeguard Islam, constitutional supremacy, the rule of law and public peace.
“The growing presence of the monarchy in the political sphere is not unconstitutional, but rather consistent with the constitutional order,” he said.

Other constitutional lawyers take a narrower reading, emphasising that royal authority is largely exercised on advice and that personal discretion is confined to specified circumstances.
The Malaysian Bar, the professional body representing lawyers in Peninsular Malaysia, has described the monarch as possessing extensive formal authority but limited personal power, except during exceptional situations in which discretion comes into play.
The state vs the crown
The palace’s growing prominence has not come without friction.
“Dr [Mahathir] came quite close to abolishing the monarchies in 1983 and 1993,” Andrew Harding, a leading scholar in Malaysian constitutional law, told This Week in Asia.
In 1983, Mahathir confronted the Malay rulers, triggering a constitutional crisis when he introduced amendments aimed at limiting the king’s authority to withhold or remove the palace’s power of assent to legislation while shifting emergency powers away from the monarch.
Mahathir faced strong opposition as the rulers resisted, leading to a months-long constitutional stand-off before a compromise was reached.
The outcome was a subsequent constitutional amendment in 1984 – limiting royal assent: if the king does not assent to a bill within 30 days, it automatically becomes law. The king was also granted 30 to 60 days, depending on the approved bill, to return it to parliament for further debate if it was not assented to.
The palace’s constitutional role regarding emergency remained intact, as Mahathir backed down from his initial proposal to transfer that power to the prime minister, and state-level powers also remained intact.
This was the first modern-day battle between state-elected leaders and the monarchy in Malaysia’s history. But it was not the last.

Mahathir has had a sticky relationship with Johor’s royal family dating back to the early 1990s, when his government revoked immunities from the Malay rulers following alleged assaults by the Johorean royalty.
Between 2018 and 2020, when Mahathir returned to power as prime minister, he again opposed the Johor palace. He went as far as calling the Johor crown prince, Tunku Ismail Sultan Ibrahim, a “little boy” during a public argument over whether the federal government or the royal family had the ultimate right to administer the state government and appoint top officials.
The latest row in June involved the crown prince criticising Member of Parliament Syed Saddiq over his political stance and governance.
Syed responded that politics was “not a Hollywood movie”, sparking a heated public exchange between him and the Johor royal.
Harding said political fragmentation since 2018 had created greater room for the monarchy to exercise and extend its established constitutional functions, including in the appointment of governments and decisions over whether to dissolve legislatures.
“It is true that politics abhors a vacuum,” he said.
Nine crowns
The public clashes only showcase one dimension of Malaysia’s constitutional monarchy.
The debate is complicated by the fact that Malaysia does not have a single uniform monarchy.
Each royal state has its own constitution, succession rules and historical relationship between palace, government and traditional authorities. Johor’s royal house has long maintained a highly visible place in the state’s public life, while Negeri Sembilan follows a distinctive system drawn from Minangkabau custom.
There, the Yang di-Pertuan Besar is selected from eligible princes by four territorial chieftains known as the undang. The system amounts to an elective state monarchy nested within Malaysia’s elective federal monarchy.

Its complexity burst into national view this year when a succession dispute involving Tuanku Muhriz Tuanku Munawir, several chieftains and a rival claimant spilled into public declarations, court proceedings and competing interpretations of the state constitution.
The palace consolidated its position following the Negeri Sembilan polls on August 1, with Tuanku Muhriz dismissing the undang of Jelebu and revoking the royal titles of several figures linked to the succession dispute, clearing the way for the swearing-in of the new state government and Barisan Nasional’s Ismail Lasim as the new menteri besar the following day.
BN secured a win in the state polls, taking 18 of the 36 seats, defeating PH’s 11 and ultimately forming the state government with a supermajority of 25 through electoral cooperation with opposition Perikatan Nasional.
Tuanku Muhriz urged freshly elected assemblymen to ensure the interests of the state and its people are put above political or personal considerations.
“To the candidates who were unsuccessful in this election, I hope that all of you will continue to serve the people with dedication and contribute to the well-being of society and the progress of Negeri Sembilan,” the ruler said during the swearing-in ceremony at Istana Besar Seri Menanti.
His remarks followed months of political and royal uncertainty that strained Negeri Sembilan’s unique constitutional system, underscoring that the state constitution remains intertwined with state governance even as the broader royal dispute continues through the courts.
A rare postponement of the Conference of Rulers’ meeting set for June 23-25 had pushed the Negeri Sembilan succession dispute into politics. The next meeting is yet to be determined.
In June, Prime Minister Anwar said the federal government continued to recognise Tuanku Muhriz, after Tunku Nadzaruddin Tuanku Ja’afar was proclaimed as the new ruler at a hotel in neighbouring Melaka.
The dispute remained entangled in litigation and arguments over the authority of the undang and the state’s royal council.

Wan Ahmad Fauzi said the controversy exposed a widespread misunderstanding of Negeri Sembilan’s royal structure.
“The ruler of Negeri Sembilan is not the Yang di-Pertuan Besar alone,” he said, arguing that the constitutional duties of the ruling chieftains should not be dismissed as merely customary positions.
The episode differed sharply from the 2022 federal deadlock, but both forced Malaysians to confront the architecture beneath their monarchy, including powers and traditions that usually remain distant from everyday political debate.
Historian Milner said the central question was whether the monarchy could continue supplying stability when elected institutions faltered.
“Monarchy, on the face of it, is an outdated institution,” he said. “In recent times, however, it may be gaining new support, especially as people look at other types of constitution.”
Constitutionally, Malaysia’s political upheavals stemming from its democratic process have shown that the monarch has played a decisive role, exercising some level of discretion on who leads the nation based on parliamentary majority and support.
Lim, the constitutional lawyer, said decisions made by the palace had gone beyond what was widely deemed as a ceremonial role previously.
“So when political parties are not as strong as they used to be, the monarchs invariably fill that power vacuum and play a much more influential role in governance, at least compared to pre-2018,” he told This Week in Asia.
According to Lim, rulers’ constitutional powers are enumerated in the federal constitution and have the force of law which is not open to question while the constitutional convention acts as a long-standing practice derived from the UK which Malaysia’s system is largely based on.
From legal observations, Lim said monarchs were not overstepping their constitutional powers. “I think the constitution is working as intended for now.”
However, he said constitutional convention might evolve, stemming from any instability of political coalitions.
“For example, it may now be a constitutional convention for the king to be consulted on the annual budget or on major public policies before they are rolled out, which I definitely see happening unlike before,” Lim said. “The monarchs will no doubt be playing a larger role in governance due to the instability of political coalitions.”

New normal
Awang Azman Awang Pawi, a political analyst at the University of Malaya, said Malaysia appeared to be entering a form of conditional new normal as long as politics remained fragmented.
He said the monarchy was likely to remain more visible in matters involving government formation, legislation dissolution and determination of majority support.
“The healthiest constitutional model is one in which the monarchy remains influential but firmly bound by the constitution; respected but not politicised; and committed to safeguarding the democratic process rather than competing with the elected government.”
That prominence carries advantages and risks. Royal intervention can help break a deadlock when no political leader commands a majority, but sustained dependence on the palace may allow political parties to avoid the harder task of rebuilding durable coalitions and settling disputes through parliament.
The institution’s legitimacy also rests partly on remaining above partisan combat, even as political actors increasingly appeal to rulers, invoke palace relationships or portray royal approval as a source of authority.
For Darwisy, those arguments remain beyond the purpose of his portraits. His focus is the cultural language surrounding the institution and how it can reach a generation more familiar with short videos than royal archives.
“Not everyone reads history books, but today many people connect with art on social media,” he said. “My hope is that people don’t just see a royal portrait, but also discover and appreciate the beauty of Malaysian culture through the artwork.”


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Malaysia’s King Sultan Ibrahim Sultan Iskandar salutes the guard of honour at the National Palace in Kuala Lumpur on January 31, 2024. Photo: EPA-EFE

Malaysian artist Darwisy Mustafani transforms “songket” into a portrait of Sultan Ibrahim Iskandar and Queen Raja Zarith Sofiah before a golden-domed palace. Photo: Handout

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King of Malaysia Sultan Ibrahim Iskandar at the National Palace in Kuala Lumpur, on January 31, 2024. Photo: AFP

Malaysian King Tuanku Syed Sirajuddin Syed Putra Jamalullail (centre) with his wife Fauziah Abdul Rashid (right) and Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad at Parliament Square in Kuala Lumpur on December 13, 2001. Photo: AP

Tunku Ismail Sultan Ibrahim, crown prince of Malaysia’s Johor state. Photo: Facebook/HRH Crown Prince of Johor

Tuanku Muhriz Tuanku Munawir, the ruler of Malaysia’s Negeri Sembilan state. Photo: YouTube

Tuanku Muhriz Tuanku Munawir (second from left) sits for a photo with other royal rulers before the election for the next Malaysian king at the National Palace in Kuala Lumpur on October 27, 2023. Photo: EPA-EFE

The National Palace in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, in 2021. Photo: Xinhua

Malaysia’s King Sultan Ibrahim Iskandar (left) lunches with Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim in Johor. Photo: Facebook/anwaribrahimofficial

Malaysia’s King Sultan Abdullah Sultan Ahmad Shah and Queen Tunku Azizah Aminah Maimunah Iskandariah at Westminster Abbey in London, Britain, in May 2023. Photo: Reuters

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Unstable coalitions have created greater room for the country’s royal institutions to influence government formation, observers say


Unstable coalitions have created greater room for the country’s royal institutions to influence government formation, observers say.


Malaysia’s monarchy charts a new course amid political flux

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}Unstable coalitions have created greater room for the country’s royal institutions to influence government formation, observers say

Unstable coalitions have created greater room for the country’s royal institutions to influence government formation, observers say