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Politics of Reform and the Triumph of Pakatan Harapan 83

to path-dependence theorizing. e Barisan Nasional (BN, National Front)
achieved electoral successes for some six decades by the fact that its policies of
ethnic power-sharing were on a trajectory of increasing returns, capitalizing
on actions and policies which were electorally successful and which further
enhanced the coalition’s model of multiethnic politics. Such path-dependent
success continued in spite of ruptures of the hegemonic Malay bloc in 1969
caused by the 13 May racial riots, the 1987 internal United Malays National
Organisation (UMNO) elite struggles leading to the formation of ‘UMNO
Baru’ (New UMNO) by Mahathir Mohamad, and Anwar Ibrahim’s 1998
sacking from UMNO, leading to the Reformasi movement.
Overcoming major political ruptures was made possible by the BN’s
earlier well-managed and well-executed mediated communalism. Mediated
2
communalism is de ned as a process or political stratagem of power-sharing
that softens the most extreme ethnic, religious, and cultural demands and
presses its actors towards win-win or variable-sum outcomes rather than zero-
sum ones. As the idea of mediated communalism implies, consociational
arrangements (Lijphart 1977) and centripetal policies (Reilly 2006) function
3
to create bridging rather than just bonding dimensions of ethnic relations.
e notion of mediated communalism incorporates various forms of bridging
arrangements in social policies as a stratagem for electoral success, concomitantly
moving political actions and outcomes to a moderate centre. e BN’s model
of mediated communalism was e ective up until 2008 but was increasingly
hobbled by UMNO dominance and Malaysian Chinese Association (MCA)
and Malaysian Indian Congress (MIC) weakness and, moreover, was severely
challenged when the opposition coalition began to deploy a similar stratagem
(Saravanamuttu 2016: 10–12).
e rst serious rupture of the BN’s path-dependent success due to eroded
multiethnic support occurred in the landmark 2008 general election. e
ruling coalition lost its two-thirds command of parliamentary seats and ve
state governments fell to the opposition coalition, subsequently formalized as
Pakatan Rakyat (PR, People’s Pact), leading to the emergence of an incipient
‘twin-coalition’ party politics (Saravanamuttu 2012: 103–7). As suggested
above, the opposition alliance had developed its own e ective politics of
mediated communalism that was further mediated or in uenced by a ‘new
politics’ that valorised citizens’ participation (Loh and Saravanamuttu 2003;
Weiss 2009). e two-coalition system prevailed until the 2013 general
election, when BN lost the popular vote to its nemesis, PR.
us, it would be fair to say that both BN and the successor to PR, Pakatan
Harapan (PH, Alliance of Hope), have been heirs to major multiethnic

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