Malaysia: The general elections in Malaysia have ended in a hung parliament without a clear winner. The coalition led by opposition leader Mr. Anwar Ibrahim won the most seats, and a group that included the country’s Islamic party came in a few seats behind.

The Election Commission announced that Mr. Anwar’s Pakatan Harapan (PH) coalition won 82 of the 222 seats in Parliament. In comparison, Mr. Muhyiddin Yassin’s Malay-based Perikatan Nasional (PN) came in second with 73 seats. In the Borneo state of Sarawak, voting had to be stopped in one center because flooding made it hard for voters and election workers to get to some polling stations.

Prime Minister Mr. Ismail Sabri Yaakob, United Malays National Organisation (UMNO) party led the ruling Barisan Nasional (BN) coalition, which lost a lot of seats, and ended up with only 30. It was a significant change for an alliance that ruled Malaysia’s politics for almost 60 years after the country gained independence.

Mr. Anwar and Mr. Muhyiddin claimed that their coalitions had enough support to form the government, but they did not reveal which parties they allied with. The Borneo states of Sabah and Sarawak, which have long wanted more power at the federal level, will be crucial in the formation of any government.

Persistent Coalition Talks

In recent years, there have been more and more cracks in Malaysia’s political system. After Pakatan’s historic win in 2018, ethnic Malay parties started fighting over race and religion. Most of the population in the country are Malay Muslims, but there are also large groups of Indigenous people and people of Chinese and Indian descent.

As the COVID-19 pandemic broke out in February 2020, the Pakatan coalition lost power, and the country has had three Prime Ministers in the same amount of time.

Many former Pakatan politicians who helped engineer that collapse were soundly punished at the ballot box, and one even lost her deposit.

Former Prime Minister Mr. Mahathir Mohamad also lost his deposit. Mr. Mahathir was 97 years old and had started a new Malay-based party after Pakatan fell apart. The Election Commission said that Mr. Mahathir came in fourth in a five-way race on the resort island of Langkawi. It was a shocking loss for those who had been in charge of Malaysia for about 22 years until 2003 and were once prominent for making the country a significant exporter.

Mr. Muhyiddin’s PN made progress because PAS, an Islamist party whose traditional strongholds were in northern and central Malaysia, got more people to vote for it.

In Penang state, which has been Mr. Anwar’s family’s stronghold for a long time, the PAS candidate beat Anwar’s daughter, Ms. Nurul Izzah Anwar.

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