NURUL IZZAH ANWAR

Biography

Nurul Izzah binti Anwar (born 19 November 1980 in Kuala Lumpur) is deputy president of the People's Justice Party (PKR), elected in 2025. She was the Member of Parliament for Lembah Pantai from 2008 to 2018 and for Permatang Pauh from 2018 to 2022. She is the eldest daughter of Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim and Wan Azizah Wan Ismail, the country's first female deputy prime minister. She was educated at Sekolah Menengah Assunta in Petaling Jaya, took a degree in electrical and electronic engineering at Universiti Tenaga Nasional in 2004, and completed a master's in international relations at the School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University, in 2007. Nurul Izzah became a public figure at seventeen, when her father was dismissed and imprisoned in 1998. Her role alongside her mother in the Reformasi protests earned her the nickname Puteri Reformasi, and in 1999 she was among the founders of PKR. She won Lembah Pantai in 2008 with 21,728 votes against 18,833 for the sitting women's minister, Shahrizat Abdul Jalil — an upset widely seen as one of the defining results of that election — and was elected PKR's youngest vice-president in 2010. In parliament she campaigned on open government, parliamentary oversight and needs-based rather than ethnicity-based policy, and introduced private member's bills on hate crime, the Sedition Act, the Petroleum Development Act and media regulation. She chaired the parliamentary TVET Empowerment Committee and led work on a multidimensional poverty index. She faced investigation under the Sedition Act over her activism, and has been an advocate for women's legal protections, prison reform and Palestinian rights. After losing her seat in 2022 she was appointed her father's senior economics and finance adviser in an unpaid capacity, stepping down a month later to join the Finance Advisory Panel secretariat, and worked through think tanks including the Social & Economic Research Initiative. She was elected PKR deputy president in May 2025, defeating Rafizi Ramli by 9,803 votes to 3,866. Both her adviser role and her party election prompted public debate about nepotism and dynastic politics, which she and Anwar have rejected, noting that the deputy presidency was decided by an intra-party ballot.

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Electoral track record

68 mentions across 17 months

News mentions