(Bloomberg Opinion) -- You know a parliamentary democracy is in deep trouble when a king has to tell lawmakers to pass a budget. That Malaysia's monarch, usually a background ceremonial figure, has become so involved in basic government shows the breakdown in the political economy. But it goes wider than that. This is a country losing all sense of leadership.Like waxwork figures, the dominant players in Kuala Lumpur are the same folks at or near the top of their game when I lived there in the 1990s. Few Malaysians could name a member of the royal families; the position of king is rotated among the hereditary sultans of nine states. But the country is now so skewed along political, cultural and economic divides that the current one has come out of the shadows to referee old feuds. The pandemic has aggravated these wounds.Take Mahathir Mohamed, who ran the government from 1981 to 2003, and had a second spell as prime minister as the leader of his former opponents from 2018 until March. At 95, he’s still maneuvering for another shot. Mahathir would be remembered, with justification, as a nation builder if he knew when to gracefully bow out.Instead, he manages to do Malaysia an incredible disservice, pressing buttons guaranteed to rile up segments of society and to spark outrage in the West. He was at it again Thursday, weighing in that Muslims had a right to kill millions of French people in response to “massacres of the past.” France urged Twitter to suspend his account. The post was removed. Lack of leadership unfortunately goes beyond one man. The king, Abdullah Ahmad Shah, has signaled that his support for current Prime Minister Muhyiddin Yassin’s cabinet is tenuous, admonishing lawmakers to approve the budget for 2021. Last Sunday, he denied Muhyiddin's plea to sign off on a state-of-emergency declaration. The prime minister would have obtained funding and other rule-making powers by executive order — not an insane idea, given the deep recession and surge in Covid-19 infections. The more corrosive impact would have been effectively freezing challenges to Muhyiddin by suspending parliament, where he holds a wavering, paper-thin majority.

Unlike neighboring Indonesia and the Philippines, politics in Malaysia seems unable to throw up newcomers or mold-breakers. Flawed as they are, presidents Joko Widodo and Rodrigo Duterte testify to the abilities of their respective countries to renew leadership. Should Muhyiddin be toppled in coming weeks, Malaysia would be on its fourth government in three years. That’s a dramatic shift, given that one bloc led from independence in 1957 until 2018. Malaysia seems to be stuck in 1998, and the great political and economic upheaval of the Asian financial crisis. Anwar Ibrahim, who was struck down as Mahathir’s heir-apparent back then, always seems to be on the cusp of becoming prime minister, only to stumble — or be jailed. He’s making another gambit. Najib Razak, the former premier convicted of corruption in the 1MDB scandal, remains a force within the leading political party. They’re all of a younger generation than Mahathir, but it’s hardly a victory for youth; Muhyiddin is 73.