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48 Faisal S. Hazis

through the now-defunct United Sabah National Organisation (USNO), a
multiracial party with a Muslim majority. In order to accommodate the non-
Muslims in USNO, then-UMNO President Mahathir Mohamad changed
the party’s constitution to allow non-Malay-Muslim members to join the
party. UMNO entered Sabah to wrest back the state from the opposition
Parti Bersatu Sabah (PBS), which it did in 1994 (Hamdan 2017). Arguably
the most in uential warlord in the state was Musa Aman, who became the
longest-serving UMNO Sabah chairman and chief minister. His biggest rival
was Sha e Apdal, who had large followings along the east coast of Sabah and
among UMNO members in the Peninsula.
rough his powerful chief minister’s o ce, Musa utilized state resources
to build a network of clients within UMNO Sabah. When political patronage
did not work, Musa employed repressive measures to silence his critics. In
2015, an UMNO divisional leader, Jumat Idris, was suspended from the
party for six years after allegedly plotting to unseat Musa. After the exit of
Sha e Apdal from UMNO in 2016, Salleh Keruak was seen to be Musa’s main
competitor. It was popularly believed that Salleh was the main guy behind
the plot to topple Musa in 2015, not Jumat Idris. However, Salleh was very
cunning and left no traces behind. Furthermore, Salleh’s strong link to Prime
Minister Najib Razak stopped Musa from making any unnecessary moves
against Salleh.
Despite UMNO’s past splits, the Malay party and BN remained the
dominant party and coalition until GE14. Why did fragmentation among
UMNO elites in 1951, 1969, 1987, and 1998 not lead to the party’s collapse?
Regime change did not take place during the four previous UMNO splits
because other BN component parties did not face major crises at the time
that could have eroded their own support bases. More than half of the ‘Malay
seats’ that UMNO contested still had signi cant numbers of non-Malay
voters; hence, without a substantial swing in non-Malay votes, the opposition
could not seriously challenge UMNO’s dominance, even in Malay-majority
constituencies. And even when UMNO failed to win two-thirds of Malay seats,
like from 1999 until the 2008 general election, other BN component parties
could still win their respective seats and deliver the two-thirds parliamentary
majority that UMNO had traditionally ensured.

Malay Voters in GE14
A total of 14.9 million voters were registered for GE14, slightly more than half
of the total population of Malaysia (New Straits Times 2018). As the biggest

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