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46 Faisal S. Hazis

a new, multiethnic party (with support mainly from ethnic Indians), the
Independence of Malaya Party (IMP), that September. Several UMNO supreme
council members who were aligned with Onn also quit the party. According to
Ahmad Fawzi (1992: 80), Onn’s resignation split not only UMNO, but also
the civil service. However, the split did not have much impact on UMNO and
its fellow Alliance parties’ performance in the 1955 general election, mainly
due to the absence of strong opposition parties. e Alliance won 51 out of 52
seats, with UMNO’s losing just one seat to PAS. For its part, IMP contested
in the 1952 local election and won only one seat, then disbanded in 1953 due
to its poor reception among the public. Tunku Abdul Rahman, who took over
UMNO’s leadership from Onn, then led UMNO again to power in the rst
post-independence general election, in 1959 (Norshahril 2015).
UMNO faced a second split after a poor showing in the 1969 general
election that led to the bloody 13th May riots. Malay ‘ultras’ (the right wing)
in the party took advantage of this crisis by pressuring the Tunku to resign.
ey were not happy with his ‘generosity’ toward ethnic Chinese, which they
deemed to be at the expense of Malays (Ahmad Fawzi 1992: 84). Facing
mounting pressure from this faction, including Mahathir Mohamad—who
was his harshest critic—the Tunku resigned the following year. Abdul Razak
took over as prime minister. Razak subsequently replaced the Tunku’s men in
the cabinet and party with his own loyalists, thus cementing his grip on the
government and party. Razak further strengthened his position by co-opting
opposition parties into a bigger coalition, known as Barisan Nasional, in 1973.
In the following year, BN regained its electoral dominance by winning most of
the seats the Alliance had lost in 1969.
e Malay party was confronted with another split almost two decades
later. is split was triggered by former nance minister and party treasurer
Razaleigh Hamzah’s determination to depose Mahathir as party president
and prime minister. Razaleigh’s faction alleged that Mahathir had practiced
selective patronage that led to the creation of ‘new rich’ among his faction
in the party, led by Daim Zainuddin and Anwar Ibrahim (Gomez and Kaur
2014: 7). But in the 1987 party election, Razaleigh failed in his bid to unseat
Mahathir as party president and was subsequently removed from the party.
Just like Onn, Razaleigh formed a new party, albeit a Malay-based one, Parti
Semangat ’46 (Spirit of ’46, recalling the year of UMNO’s founding) to
pursue his ght with Mahathir and also to replace UMNO. e 1987 split had
a more profound e ect on UMNO than earlier rifts had, as is evident from the
1990 general election results. UMNO lost twelve seats to PAS and Semangat
’46, which were aligned—the worst showing for the BN’s leading party since

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