Page 36 - Towards_a_New_Malaysia_The_2018_Election_and_Its_6146371_(z-lib.org)

How Malaysia Voted in 2018 21

4
to GE14, particularly at the national level and among some state leaders. At
the core of these suspicions was the notion that if PAS did not cooperate with
PH, the Malay opposition vote would be split, thus allowing BN to prevail
even with a much lower popular-vote share. e source of such thinking was
voting patterns in GE13: the opposition coalition’s Malay support derived
largely from supporters PAS mobilized. e assumption then was that if PAS
stood separately from BN and PH, the latter would not garner the numbers
to overcome BN, despite attracting superlative non-Malay support. Indeed,
PAS’s departure from the opposition Pakatan Rakyat (People’s Pact, PR) in
2015 put the coalition’s viability in jeopardy as far as garnering Malay votes
was concerned, prompting coalition member Parti Keadilan Rakyat (People’s
Justice Party, PKR) to retain PAS within the Selangor state government, despite
having to endure the embarrassment of being openly rejected by the Islamist
party during its party conventions (Muzliza 2017).
As the election unfolded, PH’s supposed collapse did not materialize,
and splits in BN and PAS actually allowed PH to wrest federal power from
BN with just a sliver of Malay support, as we discuss below. As Table 2.3
illustrates, while PH was able to perform fairly well even in constituencies
with more than 70 per cent Malay voters due to the split in BN and PAS
votes, BN was the overall loser. Yet by opting to go it alone in GE14, PAS
lost traction in all districts with less than 70 per cent Malay voters and was
relegated to being a regional party in the Malay belt (see Ahmad Fauzi and
Che Hamdan, this volume). PH, on the other hand, and especially PKR, was
able to take advantage of its broad-based support and take the bulk of the
mixed-ethnicity districts, with less than 70 per cent Malay voters. e BN, in
particular UMNO, bore the brunt of its strategy’s failure, because the splits
within UMNO that led to the formation of Bersatu led also to the departure
of nearly 18 per cent of Malay voters to PH and PAS. At the same time,
UMNO and BN also managed to lose even more of the miniscule non-Malay
support they had retained from GE13, which dropped from approximately
20 per cent to only about 5–6 per cent in 2018. As a result, UMNO was not
able to muster enough support to win in districts in which Malay voters were
less than 70 per cent. Overall results showed that BN lost approximately 14
per cent of its prior support from Peninsular Malaysian voters—a decline
from 44.7 per cent in 2013 to only about 31.7 per cent in 2018 (see Table
2.4). PAS, on the other hand, also lost some supporters to PH via splinter
party Amanah, but with a lower net loss: a reduction of about 7 per cent,
compared to GE13.

This content downloaded from 139.80.253.0 on Fri, 06 Nov 2020 04:21:47 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms