Editing Mahathir Mohamad (section)

== Biography ==
Mahathir Mohamad was born in Alor Setar, Malaya in 1925, and he studied medicine and opened a practice. A member of UMNO, he became an MP in 1964 until its suspension in 1969. He was expelled from the party because of his outspoken hostility to Tunku Abdul Rahman's policy of compromise between the Malays, Chinese, and Indians of the population, advocating the predominance of the Malays instead. Readmitted as a sign of UMNO's reversal from Tunku Abdul Rahman's ideals, he became Minister of Education in 1974, and Deputy Prime Minister in 1976. In 1981, he became Prime Minister, and, as a populist nationalist, he was again confirmed in office on 25 April 1995, when his UMNO-dominated Barisan Nasional coalition received a record two-thirds majority. He left office in 2003, and he would go on to criticize his hand-picked successors Abdullah Ahmad Badawi and Najib Razak. In 2016 he left UMNO to dissociate himself from Prime Minister Najib Razak, who was involved in a corruption scandal. In 2018, at age 92, he staged an extraordinary comeback, joining the opposition Alliance of Hope and successfully challenging Najib in elections, ousting the UMNO-led National Front for the first time since independence and becoming the world's oldest elected leader. He promised to serve only for two years, after which he might be succeeded by former rival Anwar Ibrahim, whom he had jailed in 1998 and for whom he now obtained a pardon. He became Malaysia's first Prime Minister not to represent the Barisan Nasional coalition. However, he was resigned as the prime minister on [[2020 Malaysian political crisis]].