The Economist
Apr 28th 2013, 6:53 by Banyan | SINGAPORE

THE story of Lim Guan Eng, chief minister of the Malaysian state of Penang, tells much about how Malaysian politics has been transformed in recent years. Mr Lim heads the Democratic Action Party or DAP, a member of the three-party opposition coalition hoping to wrest power from the ruling Barisan Nasional in a general election on May 5th.

This is the first time since independence from Britain in 1957 that the opposition has a genuine—if still outside—chance of winning a federal-government election. That follows its startling advance in the previous general election in 2008, when, as this year, 12 of Malaysia’s 13 states held simultaneous elections. One of the opposition’s triumphs was to win the thriving state of Penang, an island off the west coast famous for its electronics and tourism industries.

So Mr Lim took up perhaps the highest-profile establishment position ever held by an opposition politician in Malaysia. This was quite a step up from his past as a jailbird. In 1998 he was sentenced to 18 months in prison for “sedition” and “spreading false news”. The offence dated back to 1995 when he spoke out about a case in which a 15-year-old girl named 15 men with whom she had had sex. Of these 14 were charged with statutory rape. The 15th, a senior politician, was not.

Such apparent injustices seemed to run in his family. His father, Lim Kit Siang, also led the DAP, which draws most of its support from Malaysia’s ethnic-Chinese minority. He was twice jailed under Malaysia’s Internal Security Act, first in 1969, after the country suffered its worst race riots, and again in 1987 when the authoritarian prime minister of the time, Mahathir Mohamad, used a row about Chinese-language education as a pretext to lock up dozens of critics. Dr Mahathir was impervious to foreign criticism of this act of repression, and a decade later, equally indifferent to the international outrage at Lim Guan Eng’s fate.

The elder Mr Lim is also back on the stump for this election, contesting a seat in one of Barisan’s strongholds, the southern state of Johor. The Lims are able to point to Penang to counter one of the government’s most strident arguments: that the opposition is untested in office, rash in its promises and its victory would be followed by a collapse in investor confidence. In fact, under the DAP, Penang has impressed outside observers. The opposition’s confidence that it will win the federal election may be for show. But the certainty the DAP expresses about retaining Penang seems real.