A Very French Affair!
Issue 51— Key Developments Across Brunei, Indonesia, and Malaysia
Editor’s Note
by the Maritime Crescent Desk
This week, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Brunei faced different challenges related to leadership, public services, and social responsibility. In Indonesia, President Prabowo's proposal to introduce French language education after his visit to France sparked criticism, with observers questioning the lack of a clear implementation plan and broader foreign policy direction. In Malaysia, an LRT derailment highlighted long-standing problems with public transport infrastructure and concerns about the country's heavy reliance on private vehicles. In Brunei, growing online hostility toward local content creators revealed tensions within the #SapotLokal movement, raising questions about the difference between constructive criticism and online hate.
Malaysia 🇲🇾
Malaysia’s Mobility Infrastructure Problem
by Sydney Gan, in Kuala Lumpur
On the 28th of May, a Light Rail Transit (LRT) passenger train was derailed in Chan Sow Lin Station due to a track switch failure. All 25 passengers were evacuated safely with no injuries reported, but the incident has sparked significant backlash against the Ministry of Transport, the breaking point in consecutive public transport failures over the years.
Since then, the MADANI government has ordered the Land Public Transport Agency (Apad) to take maximum punitive action against Prasarana Malaysia Bhd and to set up an independent task force to spearhead the investigation. The Ministry of Transport is also concurrently mulling a comprehensive internal audit of Prasarana’s rail transit systems beyond LRT services, to preemptively address future risks of infrastructure-related incidents.
Experts from the Malaysian Chinese Association noted that such measures must be backed by political will to implement post-audit policy recommendations, stating that the risk of recurrence remains unsustainably high if they are not. Other transport experts cast doubt on the government’s capability to conduct an audit at all, highlighting the lack of technical talent to sufficiently uphold institutional accountability. Ultimately, the Ministry’s measures are taken to be merely stopgap measures, with the government often taking a reactive rather than a long-term, proactive approach to transport governance reform.
This case exposes a deeper, systemic failing in Malaysia’s mobility infrastructure network, which must be seen together with Malaysia’s disregard for first- and last-mile connectivity. In peri-urban and even central urban areas, Malaysians struggle with significant station-level gaps, often forced to depend on driving to access public transport. As walkability in Malaysia is limited - due to highways and major roads surrounding neighborhoods, the lack of pedestrian-friendly infrastructure, and personal safety risks - non-drivers are completely alienated from accessing rail and bus transit in the first place. From this, a unique demand for e-hailing emerges as a Malaysian necessity, rather than a luxury, to which there are few to no alternatives.
The crippling over-reliance on car travel is especially acute against the backdrop of Malaysia’s fuel crisis. With nearly 40% of the country’s crude oil requirements transiting through the Strait of Hormuz, the MADANI government is struggling to maintain fuel prices and subsidies across the nation, which directly impacts drivers on the ground. With this weak existing infrastructure, is Malaysia at all equipped to shoulder the burden of a suddenly incapacitated, automobile-dependent population?
The rakyat’s sensitivity towards fuel pricing is being blatantly leveraged by the government to form populist policies, in order to curry favor towards targeted voter bases. This risks diluting the issue into mere political rhetoric - one must venture to examine with a critical lens why such an over-reliance on fuel exists in the first place, and why the Malaysian government has allowed the infrastructure weaknesses to persist all this while, until we are left straining under the weight of the geopolitical crisis. This incident should serve as a wake-up call to the government to take swift, strategic, forward-looking action, lest Malaysia risk significantly lagging behind in the future of mobility in Southeast Asia.
Sydney holds a Bachelor of Laws from King’s College London, where she focused on Human Rights Law, Criminology, and Public & Administrative Law. She is an Analyst at Asia Group Advisors, providing policy analysis and strategic guidance across the tech, sustainability, and gaming sectors in Southeast Asia. Prior to joining AGA, she worked in the social development sector in London, contributing to the Ukraine Judicial Training Programme through research on war crimes adjudication and the development of a legal training curriculum with high court magistrates.
Brunei Darussalam 🇧🇳
The Selective Solidarity of #SapotLokal
by Maryam Zulaidi
Lately, there has been a noticeable surge of hate across multiple social media platforms towards Bruneian ‘online personalities’. Oddly enough, the waves of hate derive from the locals themselves. is a movement across the Malay nations i.e Brunei and Malaysia in support of empowering independent local enterprises. Despite that, this slogan is narrowly interpreted as many still fail to acknowledge content creation as a genuine form of work. Thus, with the exclusion of gig workers, their solidarity is rather contradictory. There remains a reluctance among a minority of Bruneians to recognise them as influencers. Anonymous users have justified their standing by stating that these media personalities do not bring any positive impacts to the world and are constantly feeding into controversies. Most comments are evidently malicious whilst the rest are disguised under “constructive criticism”. What must be understood here is that there is a fine line between constructive criticism and hate speech.
According to the UN, hate speech is “any kind of communication in speech, writing or behaviour, that attacks or uses pejorative or discriminatory language with reference to a person or a group on the basis of who they are, in other words, based on their religion, ethnicity, nationality, race, colour, descent, gender or other identity factor.” Applying our context into the definition, it is mainly the prejudiced writing and/or speech that is used against Bruneian media personalities. In contrast, constructive criticism is a helpful remark that points out something wrong whilst giving suggestion(s) of improvement. For instance, if a Tiktok personality posts culturally insensitive content, a viewer flags the harm their content may bring and recommends that the creator delete the video and educate themselves regarding the matter. The intent of constructive criticism is therefore, not to demean but to encourage others to improve. While the two words are seemingly distinguishable on paper, they are often conflated in practice.
That said, the blame is not entirely one-sided. One should not blindly accuse the anonymous accounts, because a few of these media personalities may also struggle to understand the criticism and confuse them for hate. Consequently, they too, unintentionally fuel the provocation. Regardless of them choosing a public life, it does not give us the right to strip them of their autonomy. This choice does not justify for creators to endure personal attacks and constant ridicule. Most importantly, this act of bullying contradicts the basis of the nation’s ideology of nilai-nilai murni; good values and ethics that all Bruneians should practice.
Anonymity plays a central role in this all. When people hide behind screens, they feel protected from their accountability. This phenomenon, coined by John Suler, is called the ‘online disinhibition effect’. In a nation where mental health is still a cultural taboo, the consequences of pervasive digital aggression transcends the screen. Discreetly accumulating into a crisis that Brunei has yet to openly confront.
Maryam is a first-year International Relations and Politics student at the University of Sheffield, with an academic focus on Southeast Asia—particularly Maritime Southeast Asia—and the Middle East. She aspires to a career in diplomacy and academia and is committed to fostering international dialogue and advancing scholarly engagement with global issues. Beyond her academic work, she pursues creative interests and voluntary initiatives that broaden her perspectives on public service.
Indonesia 🇮🇩
Prabowo’s Lip Service Language-Diplomacy
by Muhammad Rayhansyah Jasin
Skipping annual prayer congregations, buying qurban animals with the state budget, this year’s Ied Adha celebrations has been marked with a slurry of controversies by President Prabowo Subianto who also decided to spend the religious festivities abroad in France. Visiting for the third time between January - May 2026, Prabowo’s May trip, postponed since April, was meant to lay the groundwork for a future strategic partnership with France and convening the first high-level Indonesia-France business council. The visit also saw a commercial agreement worth US$3.5 billion centered on energy resilience, trade, and defense cooperation. As a show of diplomatic gesture in front of President Emanuel Macron in the Elysee Palace, Prabowo instructed French language education to be introduced for all school levels in Indonesia. Another agreement also explored possible French language training programs to include police forces.
Prabowo’s education instructions are not without precedence. During Brazil’s President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva’s visit to Indonesia in late October 2025, Prabowo also stated that the government has mandated the education ministry to start teaching Portuguese. Prabowo’s haphazard vision of language diplomacy rests on global demand for more versatile skilled workers. Yet, six months on, there has not been any national guidelines or framework conceived regarding that announcement with no clear implementation from the education ministry. Observers have lamented Prabowo’s last week instruction to be no different with the Portuguese debacle, signifying the former general’s flip-flopped and unplanned foreign policy.
Both Portuguese and French have been added as priority languages alongside Spanish, Russian, English, Arabic, Japanese, Korean, and Mandarin to be taught in universities. Still, the move is seen to be based on Prabowo’s quick judgement instead of a bottom-up recommendation from academia and business leaders alike. Legislators also commented that the government must restrain from drafting education policies without considering the preparedness of education infrastructure, adequate teachers, and students’ basic needs.
Prabowo’s language diplomacy reflects a broader tendency in his foreign policy to prioritise impromptu initiatives over a coherent long-term diplomatic roadmap. This approach has attracted criticism, particularly regarding the frequency and cost of his overseas trips. Following his visit to Paris on May 28, reports from Flightradar24 indicated that a planned stop in Rome was cancelled at the last minute in favour of a direct return to Jakarta. Rumours also circulated that proposed visits to Hungary and Austria failed to materialise because no heads of state were available to welcome his entourage.
Criticism has extended beyond scheduling concerns. Former Deputy Foreign Minister Dino Pati Djalal urged Prabowo to reduce his overseas travel, noting that he has spent roughly one out of every six days abroad over the past eighteen months, with some trips reportedly costing hundreds of billions of rupiah. While Cabinet Secretary Teddy Indra Wijaya defended these expenses by claiming that any budget overruns were personally covered by Prabowo, concerns remain about fiscal discipline and policy consistency.
Deepening ties with the European Union, particularly France, is important for Indonesia’s strategic position. However, these efforts should complement, rather than overshadow, Jakarta’s leadership role within Southeast Asia. Without close coordination with neighbouring states, Indonesia risks weakening its influence within ASEAN while pursuing broader global ambitions.
Rayhan is pursuing an Erasmus Mundus Joint Master’s Degree in Public Policy at Central European University and the Institut Barcelona d’Estudis Internacionals. He holds a Bachelor of Social Sciences in International Relations and Political Economy from Ritsumeikan Asia Pacific University. His current research focuses on the socio-economic impacts of Indonesia’s nickel mining industry on local communities and national development.
Editorial Deadline 01/06/2026 11:59 PM (UTC +8)
