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64 Helen Ting Mu Hung

it as recently as the 1990s. In February 1991, Prime Minister Dr Mahathir
announced a new policy called Vision 2020. Among other provisions, it
entailed liberalizing previously restrictive cultural policies and increasing local
private higher-education opportunities, changes that non-Malays welcomed
(Loh 2002). is toning-down of the BN government’s pro-Malay ethnic
policies might have been partly motivated by the growing strength of the Malay
opposition in the 1990 general elections, as well as the ability of Semangat ’46
to form two coalitions to unite opposition parties. ough BN was returned
with a two-thirds majority in 1990, its popular vote dipped to its lowest point
6
since 1969, at 51.95 per cent (Khong 1991: 15). UMNO did not win any
parliamentary seats in Kelantan, and also lost control of the Kelantan state
government to APU, while MCA won only 18 out of the 32 parliamentary
seats it contested, 13 of which were in constituencies where Chinese voters
formed less than 50 per cent of the electorate (Khong 1991: 27).
Propagating a more inclusive narrative of the Malaysian nation, bangsa
Malaysia, as multiethnic and multireligious (Lee 2004) paid o for BN
during the 1995 general elections, drawing a surge in Chinese support,
leading correspondingly to a signi cant drop in support for DAP candidates
(Gomez 1996). e BN’s gain, however, was largely limited to Chinese voters:
UMNO did not improve its performance signi cantly in the heavily Malay
northeastern states of Kedah, Kelantan, and Terengganu when compared with
1990, due both to continued factionalism within the party and to PAS’s strong
showing in its traditional stronghold.

Table 4.1 Number of parliamentary seats won by MCA, Gerakan, and
DAP (1982–2018)
1982 1986 1990 1995 1999 2004 2008 2013 2018
MCA 24 17 18 30 26 31 15 7 1
Gerakan 5 5 5 7 7 10 2 1 0
DAP 9 24 20 9 10 12 28 38 42
Sources: Crouch 1982; Khong 1991; Gomez 1996; SIRD 2000; e Star [2018].

While the surge of Chinese goodwill towards BN throughout the 1990s
did not a ect hard-core supporters of DAP, this moderate level of support
was su cient to provide added advantage to BN in seats with relatively evenly
distributed ethnic composition. Gomez (1996) notes that the BN government
created more such seats with the 1993 constituency delimitation exercise,
which probably saved BN from losing the 1999 general elections in the face

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