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Towards a New Malaysia? 3

Islamic Party) won 18 seats, with 17 per cent of the vote. Independents in
Sarawak won 3 seats and Parti Solidariti Tanah Airku Rakyat Sabah (Solidariti
or STAR, the Sabah-based Homeland Solidarity Party) won one seat.
Not long after the polls, ve UMNO legislators left the party; four became
independent lawmakers and one jumped to Pakatan. With BN’s defeat
the coalition nearly collapsed: only the founding partners in the pre-BN
Alliance—the Malaysian Chinese Association (MCA) and Malaysian Indian
Congress (MIC)—stayed in the coalition. None of the parties that left had
won seats in Peninsular Malaysia, but their hiving o in Sabah and Sarawak,
forming state-speci c blocs, mattered more. Meanwhile, at the head of the
new government was a man who had substantially forged the system he now
supplanted: Mahathir Mohamad, formerly UMNO’s longest-serving prime
minister (1981–2003) and key architect of innovations from Malaysia’s far-
reaching preferential policies to the policies of its developmentalist heyday.
e plan was, though, that Anwar Ibrahim, de facto, then soon o cial, leader
of Pakatan member Parti Keadilan Rakyat (PKR, People’s Justice Party) would
take over in around two years from Mahathir—who at the time of the election,
was a remarkably hale 92 years old.
While few predicted the BN’s loss, the popular vote was a complete surprise
to no one—it tracked fairly closely the result in the previous general election
in 2013, GE13. (Indeed, in his chapter, Johan Saravanamuttu suggests this
outcome and others to be essentially path-dependent.) at year, the opposition
coalition won about the same percentage of the popular vote (50.7 per cent),
but only three states (Kelantan, Penang, and Selangor) and a minority share of
parliamentary seats (89 of 222); in 2008, the same parties had together won
ve states (Kedah, Kelantan, Penang, Selangor, and—ephemerally—Perak)
and, for the rst time, denied BN a two-thirds majority in Parliament. at
Pakatan Rakyat (PR, People’s Pact) coalition, formed out of 2008’s electoral
pact, was somewhat di erently constituted from Pakatan Harapan. PAS was
part of it, together with PKR and the Democratic Action Party (DAP); PR was
itself a reworking of an earlier coalition, 1999’s Barisan Alternatif. PAS exited
2
PR in 2015, amid heated debates over a PAS proposal to allow states to buttress
punishments under sharia law and extend them to criminal cases. As Hew Wai
Weng details in his chapter, a splinter party, Parti Amanah Negara (Amanah,
National Trust Party), allied with DAP and PKR in Pakatan Harapan and was
joined later by Mahathir’s Parti Pribumi Bersatu Malaysia (Bersatu, Malaysian
United Indigenous Party), which he and other UMNO exiles launched in late
2016. Whereas the original Pakatan baseline was a noncommunal (or less-
communal), justice-oriented politics, Bersatu advocated for Malays’ special

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