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84 Johan Saravanamuttu

coalitions of electoral politics, one with a longer path-dependent success than
the other, although the latter was ascendant. While the BN model dates back
to the 1959 general election and its progenitor coalition, the Alliance, the
PH model had its genesis in the Reformasi movement of 1998. While the
BN’s legacy and domination of Malaysian electoral politics had thus spanned
some six decades, its loss of FMA in 2008, reinforced in 2013, led to its
ultimate defeat in 2018. As will be shown, a comprehensive vote swing of
about 19 percentage points against BN, including votes for PAS (Parti Islam
SeMalaysia, Pan-Malaysian Islamic Party) and its Gagasan Sejahtera coalition,
as well as Parti Warisan Sabah (Sabah Heritage Party, Warisan), translated
to approximately 66 per cent of the popular votes going against the BN.
Extrapolating ethnic patterns from overall electoral results on the peninsula
and plausible survey research, such as from the Merdeka Center, suggests that
more than 90 per cent of Chinese, around 60–70 per cent of Indians, and
between 25–40 per cent of Malays voted for regime change, depending on the
4
electoral terrain one analyses.
Chart 5.1 shows the trend line of parliamentary elections for peninsular
states since 1995. e path-dependent character of the swing of votes against
BN is evident from 2008 onwards, as I suggested earlier. What is remarkable is
that the swing from 2013 to 2018 occurred in all states, tipping the scales such
that more than half the voters in each state—even in the federal territory of
Putrajaya, which comprises mainly civil servants—voted against the BN. e
massive swing in votes in Malaysia’s two most urban states of Selangor (79 per
cent) and Penang (77 per cent) and in the Federal Territory of Kuala Lumpur
(80 per cent) presages a trend that will be hard to overturn in the next election
and possibly well beyond that.
e second set of charts (Charts 5.2 and 5.3) shows the overall vote-
shares of the two main coalitions and of PAS and Warisan. It should be noted
that PH only won about 46 per cent of the overall vote and thereby is the
bene ciary of a ‘manufactured majority’, that is, winning a majority of seats
without winning the popular vote, as an artefact of the electoral system (Rae
1967: 74–7). It is also evident that PAS has re-established itself as a strong
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third force in peninsular politics (Azmil 2018), as has Warisan as a new political
force in Sabah, both drawing on stable bases of anti-BN voters.
e three-way fragmentation of Malay voters had a major impact on GE14
and will be analysed fully in a later section. PAS’s splitting of Malay votes
a ected BN more than it did PH. PAS supporters largely perceived PAS as in
‘opposition’ to BN despite evidence that there may have been UMNO–PAS
elite collusion. As such, PAS voters eroded BN strength in three-cornered and
multicornered contests. us, BN faced three strong rivals: PH in the west-coast

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