“We try to encourage the young generation to vote for us. If they [the ruling party in government] win, Malaysia will never change,” Marina said at the Bangkok Edge festival at the weekend.

“For me, it’s clear that you [Malaysians] should vote for the opposition alliance Pakatan Harapan [PH]. Because we have had this government for too long and they are not going to change – they will do everything to stay in power. The government controls the press and security council. It’d be really hard to win, unless Malaysians get totally fed up,” she said.

Religious elements present in the election campaign agenda in the upcoming election also had a strong voice, she said.

The ruling party tried to get support from Muslim Malays, notably in the rural areas, so they are trying to capture votes by putting up the most conservative ideas about Islam into their campaign, she said.

“This strategy created a really kind of disturbing atmosphere where people – both nonMuslims particularly and progressive Muslims – are worried where these [ideas] are going to lead, just because they [the ruling party] want to get votes,” she said.

Islamisation is also affecting women in her country. “Islamisation is a very broad term, basically when I say that I mean the state form of Islam is very bureaucratic and very controlled and it wants everyone to conform to one type of Islam, which is very [strict] Sunni Islam. It’s more strict than we are used to,” she said.

The trend had a lot of implications for everyone in Malaysia, whether Muslim or nonMuslim, particularly for women because it reflected a type of thinking “which is I don’t think it’s based on the Koran or anything but on a very patriarchal attitude”.

“It’s not only putting the women’s issues and women’s rights into the agenda, I also help with the general issues, especially the big issue in Malaysia, which is corruption.”

“All these things impact everybody, but particularly women. If we have a culture of corruption, women have less money so they cannot do anything because they cannot pay bribes. These issues to me are women’s issues,” she said.

“We, women’s groups, have to keep insisting. The women’s issues and women’s rights are very big parts of the democracy. Unfortunately, both sides are not talking about these, including the opposition,” she said, noting that she wanted to see more female candidates in the election.

“Right now we have very low amount, we have only 10 per cent of female MPs,” she said, adding that she did not want to be a candidate herself.

At the age of 60, she said, “I think I’m too old already. We want to put up more young female election candidates.”