Mutant Robin Hood: Anwar's Budget calculus
Will Budget 2026 once again dress caution up as change?
Shipping this off at 12.05am. You’ll either read it now (if you’re a midnight owl) or later in the morning.
Either way, that’s fine. It sets the tone for what’s to come in a few hours: Budget 2026.
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Budget season is always a boring curious phenomenon.
There’s aspiration, some banter, a fixation on the prime minister’s outfit, plenty of commentary, and then it just… fades away.
But covering the Budget is like a drug — an addiction.
Deep down, we keep hoping for something bold or transformative. Even when disappointment sets in, we come back for more. I’m no different.
Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim will table his fourth budget this evening.
Post-2018, he’s lasted longer than his predecessors, juggling demands from allies once deemed polar opposites.
They are united now not so much by royal decree (that was the early spin) as by the shared instinct to cling to power.
As he prepares to table the Budget, Anwar still walks a high-stakes tightrope.
Malaysians should by now recognise that the reformist promises once tied to Pakatan Harapan are largely off the table, or at least, their idealistic versions are.
Anwar’s past budgets share one trait: he gives off the impression that he plays the centre.
We hear the usual pledges to narrow the fiscal deficit — from 5.6% of GDP in 2022 to a targeted 3.8% in 2025 — while championing his Madani framework, which supposedly (key word) rests on equity, growth and reform.
Yet each presentation has faced the same headwinds: a fragile “unity” coalition of former rivals, public anger over living costs, opposition attacks painting reforms as elite burdens, and the balancing act of fiscal discipline amid global uncertainties such as US tariffs of up to 24% on exports.
To manage dissent, Anwar has morphed into a kind of mutant Robin Hood.
His reluctance to go all-in on taxing the rich — steering clear of wealth or inheritance taxes — shows how he weighs political reality against popular demand.
Yet holding the maha kaya (ultra rich) to account is what he goes on sloganeering regularly.
Five issues under Anwar remain largely untouched from a money-and-power lens: comprehensive subsidy rationalisation, civil-service bloat and pension reform, taxation of the wealthy, institutional anti-corruption reform, and bumiputera equity targets.