WASHINGTON

AS THE DUST CLEARS from last weekend’s elections in Malaysia, the world has a huge stake in seeing that the multi-religious country remains a moderate Muslim democracy with no tolerance for Islamist-based terrorism.

While the ruling Barisan National Coalition under Prime Minister Abdullah Badawi remains in power — as it has since Malaysia’s independence half a century ago from the British — in this election, it won just 51 percent of the votes; and 63 percent of parliamentary seats.

While still representing majority control, this is down from the more than 60 percent of the vote and over 90 percent of the parliamentary seats it won four years ago. Ironically, most of the defections came from the ethnic Chinese and Indians who make up about one-third of the population, and who for the first time voted for opposition parties, thus rebuking the coalition for being insufficiently sensitive to minorities.

Yet in abandoning the coalition, these voters now find themselves facilitating greater power for the radical Islamists represented by the Parti Islam se-Malaysia (PAS).

Before the election, the PAS had controlled only the state of Kelantan, in the northeast, where they had enforced shari’a law, and called for broad bans on nightclubs and alcohol. They also urged imposing shari’a-associated “hudud” punishments, such as amputations and stoning for certain crimes.

In the city of Kota Baru, in Kelantan, queues in supermarkets are by law strictly gender-segregated to prevent opposite sexes from touching and committing the Islamic “crime” of khalwat. Women are also subjected to strict Islamist dress codes.

Now the PAS has won across Malaysia’s geographic center, winning the majority of state seats in two more states where they will move forward with more efforts to impose shari’a on the public as a whole.

Worse from the security standpoint, three of the four states that border Thailand are now under PAS control. As Southeast Asia terrorist expert Zachary Abuza has observed, the ability of Thai extremists to take advantage of Thailand’s border with Malaysia to obtain safe haven in areas controlled by the PAS has given them the breathing room to build their capacity. That dynamic will worsen now that PAS controls most of the Thailand-Malaysia border.

The extremist threat in the region remains real:

Two of the 9/11 hijackers passed through Kuala Lumpur in January 2000, hosted by an alleged member of the al-Qaida affiliate Jemaah Islamiyah (JI). And two USS Cole bombing plotters also spent time in Malaysia courtesy of JI.

In addition, key figures in the Bali and the J.W. Marriott hotel bombings in Indonesia prepared their attacks while living in Malaysia.

Malaysian police still periodically find cells linked to JI terrorists with illegal firearms and bomb-making equipment or materials.

While the Badawi government in Malaysia has had zero tolerance for militant or terrorist activity from whatever source, the record of the now surging JI is more worrisome. This is not the case for the PAS, which while recently softening its Islamic fundamentalist message has long pressed for imposition of the full range of shari’a law, including the death penalty for apostasy, the crime applied to any Muslim who converts to another religion.

Post-election, the most internationally visible leader of the opposition, Anwar Ibrahim, of the People’s Justice Party (PJP), continues to depend on his alliance with PAS for his electoral clout, together with a left-leaning Chinese ethnic group, called DAP.

By using PAS to leverage his own small political base, Ibrahim has locked himself into an alliance with a party that called for jihad against the West following the 2001 military action against the Taliban in Afghanistan, and offered rhetorical support for Osama bin Laden, al-Qaida in general and the Taliban.

All of this has created huge internal contradictions among the opposition political parties. The Badawi government suffered losses in the election because one group feared creeping Islamism and the other accused it of not going far enough to integrate religion into the country’s governance.

The message sent by the Indian and Chinese voters who wanted greater rights was the exact opposite of the message sent by those who voted for PAS, even as the PJP’s message has been little more than one reciting a mantra of “change.”

For Malaysia, some change, including more effective action against corruption and the protection of minorities against extremist excesses, is clearly desirable. But stability is also needed to consolidate what former U.N. Secretary Gen. Kofi Annan last year called Malaysia’s “enviable system of religious pluralism” and a system that has built “a robust middle class, a viable social protection system and reasonably advanced human security infrastructure.”

Over the past four years, the Badawi government has sought to steer a middle course that simultaneously is tough on terrorism, protected the special status of the majority Muslim population, and promoted economic and social opportunity for all other groups. To maintain stability and counter extremism, Malaysia will need to maintain that approach while facing a much more difficult political constellation. The stakes are indeed high.

Andrew Cochran is co-chairman of the Counterterrorism Foundation.