State elections in Malaysia

I spent a few days in Malaysia last month while on holiday, without observing a great deal in the way of political interest. (A complete inability to read Malay doesn’t help.) But much of the country went to the polls last Saturday, with six of the thirteen states holding their state elections.

The usual practice (as in many countries) is for state elections to be held in conjunction with federal elections, but the tumultuous politics of recent years in Malaysia has thrown out the timetable. I won’t attempt to relate the whole story – you can read previous instalments here and here – but it culminated in an election last November and the appointment of long-time opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim as prime minister.

Anwar’s government is a coalition between his own group, the reformist Alliance of Hope (PH, or Pakatan Harapan), and its former opponent the ethnic Malay National Front (BN, or Barisan Nasional). Its main opposition is a coalition called the National Alliance (PN, or Perikatan Nasional), chiefly composed of Bersatu, a breakaway from the National Front, and the Islamist party PAS.

Prior to Saturday, Anwar’s allies governed in nine of the 13 states and the PN in the other four. But those four opposition states included three of those voting on Saturday: Kedah, Kelantan and Terengganu (Perlis, a very small state in the far north, is the fourth). The other three elections were in Negeri Sembilan, where PH had narrowly won control at the 2018 election, and Penang and Selangor, which have long been PH strongholds.

So there were opportunities for gains on both sides, but the headline result was status quo: all six state governments were returned, three PAS and three PH. (Official results are here, albeit in Malay; I’ve supplemented them with Wikipedia and media reports.)

While the government held its three states, the swing was uniformly against it. Taken together, the government parties five years ago had won 156 of the 245 seats being contested; on Saturday that number came down to 99. But this is a somewhat artificial exercise, since last time around the two main government parties were on opposite sides.

The result has understandably put some strain on the coalition, but things could have been a good deal worse and it seems unlikely to be enough to divert Anwar from his course. As long as PAS remains firm in opposition (it too has switched sides in the past), the prime minister needs to keep BN in his corner, and that means backing it in areas where the main contest is between it and Bersatu.*

Since none of the BN-led governments (in Johor, Malacca, Pahang and Perak) were up for election this time, the relationship between the coalition partners has not yet been fully tested. But how it plays out in the future will probably determine the success of Anwar’s reformist ambitions.

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* Being a former British possession, of course, Malaysia’s elections are first-past-the-post in single-member districts, leaving plenty of scope for tactical voting and wasted votes.

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PS: Amrita Malhi now has a good post-mortem at Inside Story, with particular reference to the role of the PAS. In her words, the elections “showed that two equally competitive coalitions remain engaged in a sharp political contest, and neither can fully meet all its supporters’ diverse and often contradictory expectations.”