Do we like Mahathir Mohamad?
Our score: 3 out of 10. A big nation-building record and a 2018 comeback, but his own words on Jews and on LGBT people keep the score low.
Mahathir grew up in Alor Setar, Kedah, in a modest household with a schoolteacher dad. He trained in medicine in Singapore, worked as an army doctor, then ran a private practice before UMNO politics took over. His book The Malay Dilemma got him expelled from the party, but he was readmitted in 1972 and was prime minister by 1981.
His first stretch in charge lasted until 2003. It brought rapid growth, privatised airlines, utilities and telecoms, the North-South Expressway and the Vision 2020 plan to make Malaysia a developed nation. It also brought the 1987 Internal Security Act crackdown, which was used to arrest opponents and close newspapers.
On the harm test, the worst of it is in his own words. In 2003 he said critics fixated on one sentence, then added that the world's reaction shows Jews do control it. At Oxford in 2019 the Jewish Society cited his earlier remarks, and the Community Security Trust's Mark Gardner called him an “unrepentant anti-Semite”. We've no evidence he has ever walked this back.
On LGBT people, he told a 2018 press conference as PM: “We cannot accept, for example, LGBT, and marriage between men and men, women and women.” Activist group Pelangi answered by asking him to address hate crimes against queer people. For a page like ours, that is a clear mark against him.
The recent stuff is mostly noise. In January 2026 he was criticised across the spectrum for appearing with Papagomo, a blogger who has faced court action over defamatory remarks. In May he told a documentary that being called a dictator was “their right”, and in August he was at Putrajaya for National Day.
There's real good here too. In 2018 he came back from retirement to join Anwar Ibrahim in ousting Najib Razak's government, which was dogged by the 1MDB scandal. At the UN in 2019 he urged leaders to prepare to combat climate change rather than war. Whether you call him a statesman or a strongman mostly depends on how you read the 1980s.