Rival blocs yesterday claimed they had secured the support they needed to form a government after Malaysia’s hotly contested polls saw no party emerge with a clear majority of parliamentary seats.
Veteran opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim said his coalition had enough seats to form the country’s next government, which would allow him to become prime minister.
Former Malaysian prime minister Muhyiddin Yassin — who heads the rival Perikatan Nasional coalition — also said he was in talks to form the next administration after Saturday’s election.
Photo: Reuters
The stalemate comes in a country that has seen three governments in as many years.
In a bid to break the impasse, the palace yesterday asked the leaders of political parties to submit their preferred choice of coalition partners and for prime minister by 2pm today.
Home to 33 million people, Malaysia would need a ruling coalition with a strong mandate to tackle soaring food prices and an economy reeling from the COVID-19 pandemic.
While both leading political blocs claimed victory, neither offered details on the alliances they would make to form a government.
“We have now the majority to form a government,” Anwar said at a dawn news conference after hours of frenzied horse-trading negotiations through the night.
When pressed about who would enter into an alliance with him, Anwar did not give names, but said commitments had been made in writing and would be submitted to the king for endorsement.
At the end of vote-counting, Anwar’s Pakatan Harapan coalition won 82 seats and Perikatan Nasional grabbed 73, official results showed.
The once mighty Barisan Nasional — dominated by jailed former prime minister Najib Razak’s United Malays National Organisation (UMNO) party — trailed far behind the rest with only 30 seats, its worst performance since Malaysia won independence in 1957.
The graft-tainted bloc said it accepted the results and that it was a “big signal from the citizens towards us.”
The election also saw the rise of an Islamist party allied with Muhyiddin’s group. The Malaysian Islamic Party, or PAS, backs a hardline interpretation of Islamic law.
Ethnic Malay parties have campaigned on a platform that claims that members of Malaysia’s majority ethnicity would lose their rights if non-Malays — such as Anwar’s multiethnic bloc — are elected.
Oh Ei Sun of the Pacific Research Centre of Malaysia said that if Muhyiddin gets to form the government, the country is “likely to see a conservative theocratic coalition that will focus on religious and racial supremacy at the expense of effective economic management.”
“Perikatan Nasional’s strong message of clean government was able to make inroads into UMNO’s vote bank and captured key UMNO seats,” said Asrul Hadi Abdullah Sani, deputy managing director at BowerGroupAsia.
One of the highest profile losses in the election was former prime minister Mahathir Mohamad, 97, who was roundly defeated in his constituency.
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
UNREST: The authorities in Turkey arrested 13 Turkish journalists in five days, deported a BBC correspondent and on Thursday arrested a reporter from Sweden Waving flags and chanting slogans, many hundreds of thousands of anti-government demonstrators on Saturday rallied in Istanbul, Turkey, in defence of democracy after the arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu which sparked Turkey’s worst street unrest in more than a decade. Under a cloudless blue sky, vast crowds gathered in Maltepe on the Asian side of Turkey’s biggest city on the eve of the Eid al-Fitr celebration which started yesterday, marking the end of Ramadan. Ozgur Ozel, chairman of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), which organized the rally, said there were 2.2 million people in the crowd, but
JOINT EFFORTS: The three countries have been strengthening an alliance and pressing efforts to bolster deterrence against Beijing’s assertiveness in the South China Sea The US, Japan and the Philippines on Friday staged joint naval drills to boost crisis readiness off a disputed South China Sea shoal as a Chinese military ship kept watch from a distance. The Chinese frigate attempted to get closer to the waters, where the warships and aircraft from the three allied countries were undertaking maneuvers off the Scarborough Shoal — also known as Huangyan Island (黃岩島) and claimed by Taiwan and China — in an unsettling moment but it was warned by a Philippine frigate by radio and kept away. “There was a time when they attempted to maneuver