Malaysia State Elections: Penang, Selangor, N9, Kelantan, T'ganu, Kedah 2023 and by-elections 2023

[jaichind]

Latest Endeavour-MGC poll in Selangor

Malays
PH  61
PN  39

BN  58
PN   42

Non-Malays
PH   72
PN   28

BN   68
PN   32



The level of ethnic polarization is smaller than I expected.

The survey says that Malays expected PH-BN to win 33 seats while non-Malays expected PH-BN to win 35 seats.  This is not too far from my back-of-the-envelope guess of 36 seats for PH-BN for Selangor.

[Joseph Cao]

Another day, another poll, this time from Ilham Centre.

2416 respondents across all six states, on the question of whether they will vote for PH+BN:



And Anwar job approval ratings:



Every news article about the poll is either paywalled or in Malay but these are the main takeaways. These, and the words "significant polarization" which keep appearing…

[Joseph Cao]

the words "significant polarization" which keep appearing…

Very relevant for something I am intending to post soon, incidentally. I have not had the energy/deep knowledge to examine all 245 seats this time, but I can do my birth state of Selangor, and the smaller number of seats means there are some extra features and level of detail I can include with my overview.

Hopefully that will be ready by this time tomorrow.

[President Punxsutawney Phil]

Anwar is already underwater?

[Joseph Cao]

Anwar is already underwater?

Across the six states combined, yes. Which makes sense. In the PN-led states where he's underwater he is really disliked.

For what it's worth the Selangor number is quite a bit lower than the Endeavour-MGC poll I linked to a couple of weeks ago.

[President Punxsutawney Phil]

Anwar is already underwater?

Across the six states combined, yes. Which makes sense. In the PN-led states where he's underwater he is really disliked.

For what it's worth the Selangor number is quite a bit lower than the Endeavour-MGC poll I linked to a couple of weeks ago.

What are his approvals in, say, Sarawak and Sabah?

[Joseph Cao]

Anwar is already underwater?

Across the six states combined, yes. Which makes sense. In the PN-led states where he's underwater he is really disliked.

For what it's worth the Selangor number is quite a bit lower than the Endeavour-MGC poll I linked to a couple of weeks ago.

What are his approvals in, say, Sarawak and Sabah?

They tend not to poll individual states unless it's election time. That said Sabah and Sarawak probably have a higher approval than average just going off of demographics.

[Novelty]

I'm curious though, those in the 30s have the largest gap between approval and disapproval (after those >60s).  Why would that be so across these 6 states?

[jaichind]

The worse UMNO does in the rural Malay seats the worse it might be for PN in the next general election.  This is because on paper there is a 2/3 majority between PH BN and the Borneo parties to add seats to Parliament in the next redistricting.  Right now there is a significant malapportionment in favor of rural Malay voters.  If BN sees that it cannot win those seats then BN will most likely join forces with PH and the  Borneo parties to a) add relatively more seats to Borneo and b) add more urban and suburban seats.  If that comes to pass even if PN gets a net vote share swing relative to 2022 it will actually win a smaller % of seats in the next elections.  What would be better for PN is for UMNO wins a few Malay rural seats so UMNO has the incentive to continue the malapportionment in favor of rural Malay voters.

[Oryxslayer]

The worse UMNO does in the rural Malay seats the worse it might be for PN in the next general election.  This is because on paper there is a 2/3 majority between PH BN and the Borneo parties to add seats to Parliament in the next redistricting.  Right now there is a significant malapportionment in favor of rural Malay voters.  If BN sees that it cannot win those seats then BN will most likely join forces with PH and the  Borneo parties to a) add relatively more seats to Borneo and b) add more urban and suburban seats.  If that comes to pass even if PN gets a net vote share swing relative to 2022 it will actually win a smaller % of seats in the next elections.  What would be better for PN is for UMNO wins a few Malay rural seats so UMNO has the incentive to continue the malapportionment in favor of rural Malay voters.

Oh please tell me there's a chance that Malaysia's electoral districts actually are brought in line with the actual distribution of population, even if there are still some exceptions for Borneo or other isolated groups. Even if the gerrymandering remains.

[jaichind]

As the election wraps up it seems PN is focusing on Selangor vs Negeri Sembilan.  On paper, Negeri Sembilan should be an easier pickup for PN but they are seeing it differently. Either PN sees some real chance in Selangor or their ground report has told them that Negeri Sembilan cannot be won or both.

[Joseph Cao]

the words "significant polarization" which keep appearing…

Very relevant for something I am intending to post soon, incidentally. I have not had the energy/deep knowledge to examine all 245 seats this time, but I can do my birth state of Selangor, and the smaller number of seats means there are some extra features and level of detail I can include with my overview.

Hopefully that will be ready by this time tomorrow.

Slight delay in this but it should be coming up soon!

In the meantime, courtesy of Wikipedia user angys, here's a map that some of you may have already seen: this is the winners of each state constituency in the parliamentary elections held last year. A baseline for how each party might be expected to perform if state elections had been held concurrently with the general election.

Red is PH (40 seats), deep blue is PN (14 seats), royal blue is BN (2 seats):

[Joseph Cao]

The map above is possible thanks to Malaysiakini, which did us all the great favor of purchasing granular GE15 data from the Election Commission, even deeper than the kind usually only available for by-elections. And that means it is possible to get detailed maps of the GE15 results in every constituency by polling district.

In all the maps that follow red is PH, green is PN, and blue is BN.

Without further ado:


Parliament: P092 Sabak Bernam (PN-Bersatu)

N01 Sungai Air Tawar



We begin at the state’s northwestern tip, where Sungai Bernam flows into the Straits of Malacca and separates Selangor from Perak to the north. As best as I can tell, Sungai Air Tawar village on the river’s south bank takes its name from the fresh water of the estuary. The kampungs between the river and the coast are preoccupied with agriculture, mainly rice, coconut, and palm oil; Bagan Nakhoda Omar on the coast is a fishing village. This seat has the smallest voting population of all state constituencies in Selangor.

It has a true-blue UMNO history – Zahid Hamidi’s Bagan Datuk constituency lies across the river. Incumbent Rizam Ismail was anointed opposition leader after their trouncing in 2018, although that was his first election; the seat has seen five assemblymen in as many elections. It is likely that it will get a sixth soon, despite Rizam’s valiant efforts to leverage his youth and energy in a reelection attempt, because the PN wave broke hard in this seat. PN itself has not made the path terribly smooth for its parachuted candidate Mohamad Zaidi Selamat, former secretary to Sungai Besar MP Muslimin Yahaya, who met with a unanimous objection from the Bersatu Sabak Bernam division. But the numbers don’t lie. PN gain from BN

N02 Sabak



From here down to the Sungai Panjang road the land is dominated by palm oil plantations, although the road itself (the eastern boundary for most of the seat) cuts through rice paddies northeast of Sungai Besar. The population clusters are at opposite ends of the seat, in Sabak on the riverbank where the palm oil is managed – also the last stop on the highway before it crosses into Perak – and in the villages stretching west of Sungai Besar. These are also the PH base in the seat.

Ahmad Mustain Othman barely won the seat in 2018 on an Amanah ticket with a majority of 130, which makes this the most marginal PH-held seat. His membership in Amanah was terminated in 2020 on grounds of disciplinary violations. He joined PKR a month later. All parties involved have refused to elaborate on the reasons for any of this. In the first of many applications of both coalitions’ “incumbent rule” this has been assigned to Amanah to defend, and they have obliged with their Sabak Bernam chief, Samad Hashim, who will appear on the ballot as Cikgu Samad. The PAS challenger is Ahmad Mustain’s predecessor Sallehen Mukhyi. I don’t think further elaboration needs to be made on why I think PAS is well-poised to pick this up. PN gain from PH


Parliament: P093 Sungai Besar (PN-Bersatu)

N03 Sungai Panjang



The rice bowl of the state stretches from Sungai Besar down to Kuala Selangor. Rice paddies blanket the coastline and territory inland from the highway running northwest towards Sabak, with the interior forest still mostly untouched, with one exception: the Sungai Panjang of the seat’s name was diverted and the resulting canal brings the rice paddies right up to the Perak border where Sungai Panjang village is situated. The seat’s main town is Sungai Besar at its western end, built on the mouth of another diverted river whose name you can probably guess. The town has been the recent focus of state development, particularly its small industry and potential for a base from which to manage the agriculture and aquaculture in the rest of the seat.

Incumbent Mohd Imran Tamrin of UMNO, his party’s new Selangor Youth chief, is defending a seat with historic UMNO pedigree as the onetime base of former menteri besar Khir Toyo. All but one of the villages broke hard for PN in GE15, so he must be sweating buckets. PH and BN seem to be doing a better job of coordinating their efforts than in other nearby seats thanks to the support of local Amanah chief Zainol Azmi and next door’s Ng Suee Lim who are both fairly well known on the ground. But PAS will be able to nullify that advantage with its Sungai Besar deputy chief Mohamad Razali Saari, principal of a PAS-affiliated private religious school, who also contested this seat in 2018. Imran is less personally prominent in comparison to his opponent and combined with the wave it is very likely he gets washed out to sea on Saturday. PN gain from BN

N04 Sekinchan



As the rice marches down the coast we come to Sekinchan, home of Hokkien rice farmers, Cantonese and Hakka town residents, and Teochew fishermen, a triumvirate that dates back more than a century after several Chinese migration patterns converged here. A more physical segregation took place during the Malayan Emergency when this area became a new village. Because Communist activities were mostly incited from outside the village the British decided to give the town’s residents amnesty, and this “second chance” to leave the Communists is thought to be the origin of its name. The area is of course getting another second chance as its economy diversifies.

Some of this is owed to the relentless boosterism of Ng Suee Lim, the outgoing assembly speaker and a fluent speaker of Javanese, whose prominence in the Selangor DAP – he took the most votes in its last party polls – dates back to his capture of Sekinchan from MCA in 2004. It was the only opposition gain that election and he was one of two opposition assemblymen in a session during which then-menteri besar Khir Toyo talked optimistically of wiping the opposition out of Selangor altogether.

How the times have changed. Ng has built his goodwill and majority up steadily, despite a frightening margin of less than 200 votes in 2008 and UMNO’s attempts to move some of its base voters into Sekinchan in the run-up to 2013, and he is just about untouchable now, though it’s still unclear how the newfound support of Sekinchan native and former nemesis Jamal Yunos will affect this. Bersatu is fielding their non-Malay supporters’ wing chief Goh Gaik Meng, who lost an MCA Youth chief election to Chong Sin Woon back in the dark days of 2013; as a side note Goh, like all Bersatu’s non-Malay candidates, does not have internal voting rights within the party. PH hold


Parliament: P094 Hulu Selangor (PN-PAS)

N05 Hulu Bernam



The borderlands between the Sultanates of Perak and Selangor were of historic importance, contributing early on to the significance of the Bernam River and its surrounding land, and here in the cold air of the mountains where the river rises are communities that hold that significance even today. The primary community is Kalumpang, with the next closest thing to an urban conurbation being the spillover from Tanjung Malim just over the Perak border; both were developed early on by the enterprising tin miner Cheong Ah Peng who drew his wealth from a single hill in the area.

Cheong’s buildings are all gone but his legacy remains. The spillover is now marked by the new township of Bernam Jaya which houses employees of Proton City and the teachers’ training college in Tanjung Malim. Villages fill out the rest of the area in this seat but they are few and far between, separated by long stretches of back roads and FELDA land. Stuffed into a back corner of the seat is the Bukit Tagar landfill which has polluted the Selangor River, a site that its land developer is in the process of turning into a full-fledged “industrial city” which is definitely less polluting, worry not!

Mohd Shaid Rosli, the last UMNO woman in the assembly, survived the 2018 onslaught by exactly 200 votes and thus her seat holds the dubious distinction of UMNO’s most marginal seat. Whatever the outcome, this legacy seat will be leaving the party’s hands for the first time ever; a seat swap with Jeram means that the “defending” candidate for PH+BN is Amanah’s Hulu Selangor deputy chief Mohd Amran Mohd Shakir, a Serendah resident. As in all other UMNO seats PAS has smelled blood and have put up Mu’izuddeen Mahyuddin, an automotive engineer in Desa Anggerik and member of the party’s Hulu Selangor committee.

PAS is very clearly outworking Amanah on the ground and while it is not unimaginable that UMNO is currently too toxic to be able to exert its machinery for its own candidate, the current situation is not a great position for PH+BN to be in either. PN gain from BN

N06 Kuala Kubu Baharu



As usual a writing effort of this size is owed to the previous efforts of many other, more talented people. In this case the definitive account of Kuala Kubu Baru was already written by acclaimed essayist Rehman Rashid during his years living in the area, and any attempt to summarize the area must defer to Small Town, his final book, a loving portrait of Hulu Selangor and its history and inhabitants.

Tin mining begun with the Temuan tribe, who built a dam at the confluence of the Selangor river’s streams to sluice out the tin ore lying just underground. The dam was strengthened by the Chinese miners who joined the great Hulu Selangor tin mine, then the biggest in the known world. The next entrant was the Malay warrior Syed Mashhor as-Shahab, fleeing the Selangor Civil War; he built an earthen fort (or “kubu") here to make a last stand which never came.

The miners’ dam eventually broke in 1883. Fifty billion liters of pent-up river washed away the fort and the town and everything else in its path; this changed the course of the Selangor river and floods continued to inundate the area where the town tried to rebuild itself. So in 1926 the New Zealand-born town planner Charles Reade was called in to design a “garden township” at the top of a nearby hill, the first of its kind in Malaysia. The new town was named Kuala Kubu Baru (spellings vary). Almost uniquely – and miraculously – for an urban area in Selangor, it remains today much as it did a century ago.

The Emergency began within the boundaries of today’s Kuala Kubu Baharu seat when British high commissioner Henry Gurney was assassinated on his way to a weekend retreat in the mountains; his successor Gerald Templer established the new villages that dot this state. So it is an interesting historical echo to see most of the other non-Malay small towns of Hulu Selangor gathered into this seat. Kerling to the north, where Syed Mashhor died, retains a substantial Indian population. Rasa to the south is a Hakka food hub. The new village of Batang Kali is also drawn into the seat via a pincer that also takes in Hulu Yam, the former Communist hotspot (and in fact founded by an active member during the Emergency!) and current lor mee hotspot.

This last bit was the focus of one of the Najib-run Election Commission’s shenanigans in 2016. The EC had released a “routine” notice of changes to polling centers which surreptitiously shifted some 5000 voters into the Kuala Kubu Baharu seat which DAP’s Lee Kee Hiong had just won in 2013 with a margin of 1702 votes. The voters were swapped with the then-UMNO stronghold of Batang Kali. Obviously this violates key sections of the Elections Act, which prohibits alteration of constituency boundaries outside of a redelineation exercise. The EC did redelineate later on, officializing this change among others, and there are many more examples to come of their mendacity.

Lee Kee Hiong won a second term in 2018 with a much larger majority, but she has had bouts of illness recently and was rumored to be standing down. She does however also have a rapport with the local residents which is sorely needed now, especially on the encroaching development which threatens this lovely garden town and its surrounding small towns and villages. So she has been retained again and will fight for a third term.

Her main opponent is Serendah businessman Henry Teoh, the Hulu Selangor Gerakan Youth chief, in which capacity he now commands a deserted shophouse in Rasa that used to be former PKR MP June Leow’s constituency office. Teoh’s tenure as secretary of the Hulu Selangor Cycling Club overlaps with noted cycling fiend Rehman Rashid’s time living in the town by a few years, but there is no evidence the two ever crossed paths.

This is one of two seats where both MUDA and PRM are standing. Dr. Siva Prakash Ramasamy, who joins the rest of MUDA’s candidates in declaring their assets (full or otherwise), has a net worth of 2.6 million ringgit across 12 business ventures. His LinkedIn indicates stints with Pearson and in sales management in addition to his earlier teaching experience. To complete the ballot we have ex-DAP man Ch’ng Boon Lai, who will be familiar with Lee from his former job as Hulu Selangor councillor; he bolted the party some time after 2021 and is standing under the PRM banner. DAP big guns have fanned all across the massive seat in the past two weeks in an effort to retain one of their "gray" seats. Meanwhile Gerakan has never performed well in recent elections and I don’t expect them to start now. PH hold

N07 Batang Kali



The sprawl north from the Klang Valley into the Kanching hills has always been industry-driven, with the neatly delineated city grids of Batang Kali and Bukit Beruntung taking up the slack from old tin towns like Serendah. Batang Kali’s location as a stopoff point en route to Genting Highlands has also attracted tourists and tourism players, both of whom were badly shaken by last year’s landslide at a campsite on that route which buried 92 people and killed 31. That prompted a highway closure which has rattled many people whose livelihoods depend on the road traffic carried through this seat.

Harumaini Omar won the seat for Bersatu in 2018 and currently leads Selangor Pejuang after the party’s very public falling out with Bersatu, but he was noticeably absent from most of the discussion around this tragedy and other incidents. He has been pretty absent in general; his constituency office has been correspondingly slow to respond to events. In fact he hasn’t shown up to the state assembly at all for six months, a period that covers both the general election date and the landslide date. And so his seat was declared vacant after the assembly expelled him in March for his absenteeism without giving notice. Harumaini officially denies this. His former constituency office, at the time of writing, still has his name and party materials set out front.

With Pejuang not defending this would seem to be an open goal for Bersatu to recover the seat. But Hulu Selangor Bersatu did not get its preferred candidate, deputy chief Khairul Azhari Saut. Instead it seems that two senior leaders imposed PN’s Hulu Selangor information chief Muhammad Muhaimin Harith Abdullah Sani even after Hulu Selangor Bersatu sacked him from their committee. Given that Muhaimin is an ex-Selayang PKR Youth chief it’s not difficult to guess who the leaders are.

A few members have since gone viral filming themselves burning and stepping on the PN flag; it remains to be seen whether this affects their election machinery at all. Whether Hulu Selangor UMNO chief Mohd Isa Abu Kasim, who served as assemblyman for the seat between 2008 and 2013, can capitalize on this is another matter entirely. PAS carried the seat very comfortably en route to their Hulu Selangor win last year. PN gain from Pejuang


Parliament: P095 Tanjong Karang (PN-Bersatu)

N08 Sungai Burong



We are in the heart of the rice bowl in more ways than one. Steps toward systematic rice cultivation in northwestern Selangor began under the colonial government in 1933 with the drainage of surrounding jungle swamps and diversion of local rivers like Sungai Burong, which now supplies a canal system covering half the paddy fields in the seat. The biggest of all was a canal from Sungai Tengi, the linchpin of the Tanjong Karang Irrigation Scheme stretching as far as Sabak Bernam. Water can thus be drained into different fields at different times. Built in the 1950s, this “bangkenal” also supplied a route for timber transport and freshwater fishing and today some of its water is run through a treatment plant to supply water for the surrounding communities. Tanjong Karang, at the mouth of Sungai Tengi, naturally served as the nucleus of all this activity.

Incumbent Mohd Shamsudin Lias is the most senior remaining UMNO assemblyman, having been elected in 2004 and served as opposition leader before ragequitting the position in 2014. Like other UMNO big guns he wants to step aside for new blood, which is code for having severe disagreements with the direction of the party. To defend the seat UMNO is putting up their Tanjong Karang vice-chief, local ustaz and small business funding (TEKUN) board member Mohd Khir Ramli, in both of which capacities he is active in the area. Not to be outdone, PAS’s own candidate is former assemblyman Mohd Zamri Mohd Zainuldin, himself an ustaz; he won the seat in 2013 and drew a handsome second against Mohd Shamsudin in 2018. It is very obvious when UMNO is outmatched. PN won this seat convincingly last year and they are well placed to do so again. PN gain from BN

N09 Permatang



In the modern day, the stretch of coastline between Tanjong Karang and Kuala Selangor suffers from its lack of proximity to either area. Generally speaking the north bank of the Selangor River, up to the sprawling Raja Musa forest reserve which covers the northern part of this seat, is a largely forgotten corner of the state dotted with villages and the University of Selangor in Bestari Jaya (of which more shortly).

Closer to the mouth of the river the highway brings some life with spillover from Kuala Selangor town on the other bank, chiefly the communities around Pasir Penambang and its famous seafood market at the southern tip of this seat. Here can also be found the seat’s namesake, Kampung Permatang on a ridge above the estuary, and nearby Kampung Ujong Permatang which claims to be the oldest village in Selangor.

PKR would dearly love to retain their toehold in former BN chief Noh Omar’s home base. Their then-deputy secretary-general Mohd Yahya Mat Sahri, one of the founders of Selangor PKR, ran for the seat in 2013 and did considerably better than his 1999 run against incumbent menteri besar Abu Hassan Omar. He was then hit with charges of soliciting improper donations for then-incumbent menteri besar Khalid Ibrahim, and sentenced to two years’ jail time in 2016. Which by most accounts was a politically motivated case; the image is there however and nobody cares about the fine details or even whether a narrative happens to be correct.

Mohd Yahya had been tipped to recontest the seat until then; his wife Rozana Zainal Abidin ran in 2018 in his place and flipped the seat narrowly, breaking the UMNO stranglehold for the first time. She reportedly wants to take a break from politics and has not returned to contest. Her husband on the other hand has served out his prison sentence and is ready to make his third run for the seat. Mohd Yahya now faces Nurul Syazwani Noh who happens to be Noh Omar’s daughter, contesting under the Bersatu banner. Noh’s expulsion from UMNO has unsurprisingly rankled him against the party and moreover there is very little love lost between him and Anwar. He has made it an absolute priority to get his daughter elected against Anwar’s man.

Grudges are a very powerful thing; fatherly love is a very powerful thing. I don’t think Anwar or Amirudin have the guns to outmatch those in this seat. PN gain from PH

[Joseph Cao]

Parliament: P096 Kuala Selangor (PH-Amanah)

N10 Bukit Melawati



Selangor as an entity began in the mudflats at the mouth of the Selangor River, where the Bugis had set up shop in the late 17th century after being displaced from their native Sulawesi by the Dutch. In 1766 Raja Lumu, the Bugis chief of this area, won the Sultan of Perak’s recognition as Sultan Salehuddin of Selangor, and it was his successors to that title which became the recognized rulers of the region once the British had moved in. There are other tellings of the history of Selangor’s royalty, but the way Kedah menteri besar Sanusi Mohd Nor referred to it at a rally several weeks ago by casting aspersions on the capabilities of the Sultan is arguably the best way to get you in trouble.

Sultan Salehuddin established the first residence of his lineage at a fort on a hilltop overlooking the estuary, on the outskirts of the little fishing village of Kuala Selangor, a hill known then and now as Bukit Melawati. Originally built by emissaries of the Malacca Sultanate but coopted by the Bugis, the fort was strengthened several times, to no avail when the Dutch recaptured it in a feud with Salehuddin’s successor Sultan Ibrahim.

The fort was destroyed in the Selangor Civil War and little of it remains today. Instead there is a bustling semi-industrial and commercial town around the river mouth where the highway crosses into northwestern Selangor, with the usual mixture of rubber and palm oil plantations in its orbit. Together they form a seat where the Indian population % substantially outstrips the Chinese %, and where the elephants’ battle of Dr. Dzul and Tengku Zafrul led PH and BN to win all the polling districts in GE15.

PKR’s Juwairiya Zulkifli claims this seat as her mother’s hometown. She was a last-minute replacement for her party in 2018, after the party’s original candidate G. Sivamalar was rejected during nomination day on residency grounds, but had put in enough groundwork in the area beforehand to regain a shaky seat for the party amidst the PH wave. To the extent that she has kept up that advantage, it’s now eliminated as she’s being sent across the state to Hulu Kelang.

Kuala Selangor PKR Youth Chief Thiban Subbramaniam is the party’s pick to hold the fort here. He currently gives an address in Bestari Jaya but served as the Sepang Youth Chief prior to his current position and holds an additional research portfolio in the Economic Ministry under mentor Rafizi Ramli. Whether he has sufficient local support, and whether the Indian vote in the seat is placated this time after Juwairiya took the place of an Indian candidate in 2018, will be tested on the 12th. He faces Noorazley Yahya, a former Selangor UMNO Youth secretary who served in that position as recently as last year, who is now running on the Bersatu ticket.

Look at the map. A picture is worth a thousand words. PH hold

N11 Ijok



Ijok dates from the early 20th century and the migration patterns of the Javanese up the Selangor River, a common story in this part of the state. From this “cowboy town” the seat stretches down through more palm oil plantations and industrial landscapes and up towards a riverside settlement better known to all as Batang Berjuntai.

I want to pause here to talk about Selangor’s funniest place name. A local story traces the name to a tree in its village cemetery whose branches dangled over the Selangor River, and would sway even on windless days; it was never cut down, the legend goes, because death or misfortune came to anyone who suggested it. Since “batang” is also slang for “penis” the village became a popular attraction for visitors who liked to deface the street signs with vulgar graffiti. The Khir Toyo government, which famously hates fun, therefore changed the name in 2007 to Bestari Jaya in tandem with the university across the river – which is just as masturbatory a name if you are a property developer, frankly.

Also in 2007 this was the site of the Ijok by-election, proving ground for the nascent PKR-DAP-PAS cooperation which threw in behind then-PKR treasurer Khalid Ibrahim, still a year into his party membership at the time. Ijok had and still has a fair number of Indian voters, a legacy of the rubber plantations inland from the river, and this MIC bastion was ultimately held for BN by a little-known novice named K. Parthiban. In 2008 Parthiban was sent west to fight and lose Bukit Melawati, Khalid stayed in Ijok and won, and the rest is history, although Parthiban did recently surface at a PN Supporters’ Club meeting and was expelled from MIC after accepting a leadership position in PN’s northern Selangor chapter during the event.

Khalid lost popularity as menteri besar and ran south to Klang in 2013. His replacement in Ijok was Idris Ahmad who is not to be confused with the incumbent PAS MP for Bagan Serai; PKR’s “Dr. Idris” is a veteran of the Reformasi movement and has himself been floated for menteri besar in the 2014 and 2018 mini-crises involving the post, as a compromise candidate acceptable to all parties. But this quality paired with his reputation for pliancy also kept him from being anyone’s first choice on either occasion, and so the doctor served his two terms as a regular assemblyman and is now getting out.

Amidi Abdul Manan, director of PKR’s religious affairs department, has been assigned to defend the seat. He is also a community activist, ex-president of Malaysian Islamic Youth, and senior lecturer at the University of Selangor, and gives an address in Tanjong Karang. PAS have bowed to their future and selected “Internet personality” Jefri Mejan, who resides in Shah Alam (surprise surprise) but grew up in a kampung within the seat. The TikTok influencer did contest for PAS last time round, along with BN’s Parthiban, so this is more Back to the Future than anything else.

Both candidates are quoted as being keen to maintain Ijok’s sense of friendliness and tranquility while improving its welfare and economic standing. It’s not clear what independent candidate Tan Cat Keong thinks, but the Kuala Selangor KLSCAH liaison board chairman and Chinese Chamber of Commerce vice-president (tl;dr local Chinese bigwig) has had plenty of time to speak to the media so I’ll assume he feels the same way.

This really could go either way and PKR would be very foolish to overlook the seat. Indications are that they are doing what they need to do on the ground. But if PH+BN have found a reliable way to counter the TikTok phenomenon which is more obviously prominent in this seat than almost any other in Selangor, they haven't been using it. PN gain from PH

N12 Jeram



Few seats in Selangor exemplify the past and future of the state quite as sharply as Jeram. For the old there is the coastal town which gives the seat its name. There are a number of stories behind it, though the most straightforward attributes it to a series of waterfall rapids marked by an unusually tall tree, visible even from sailors offshore, where the settlement was eventually built at the mouth of Sungai Buloh river. Artifacts unearthed in the area have been determined to be of 15th-century heritage, possibly left by Siamese forces striking out north from Melaka.

For the new we will visit the modern-day anchor of the seat, Puncak Alam, a massive township built from repurposed FELDA land which has developed baby townships of its own. As might be guessed from the name it is a playground for Shah Alam property developers who have largely passed by Jeram town and its scenes of abject poverty without a second thought.

The Election Commission’s 2018 redelineation created an especially transparent gerrymander in Kuala Selangor, with Chinese communities previously in Ijok transferred to Jeram in exchange for UMNO-heavy plantation areas that would have turned Ijok into a nominally BN-won seat. But in the 2018 wave, this move also provided Bersatu candidate Mohd Shaid Rosli with the decisive vote margin in a seat that had never left the UMNO fold until then – one of the many ways in which the Selangor map backfired spectacularly even by the standards of BN’s fall that year.

Mohd Shaid switched his party to Pejuang in between calling on Selangor to become the world’s biggest marijuana producer and trying to shut down an alcohol section in a Puncak Alam supermarket. He is on the record as having emptied his savings accounts to contest in GE15 last year, including his haj pilgrimage fund, admitting he would not have enough funds to defend his seat. He lost his deposit.

Regardless of what this says about the role of money (or alcohol or drugs) in politics, the decision was taken out of his hands when Pejuang announced it would not be contesting the state election. So this is a straight rematch between UMNO and Bersatu. The task of “defending” the seat for Bersatu was assigned to ex-Sungai Buloh UMNO deputy chief Harrison Hassan, who has been stripped of his position and UMNO membership, although no less a personage than the sacked Khairy Jamaluddin has expressed support for him. UMNO’s actual candidate is Jahaya Ibrahim, the Kuala Selangor UMNO chief.

Jahaya is fighting an uphill battle in a seat PN carried quite heavily last year despite being outgunned by Dr. Dzulkefly and Tengku Zafrul in the parliamentary contest. Those two had popularity. The UMNO that Jahaya represents? It doesn’t. PN gain from Pejuang


Parliament: P097 Selayang (PH-PKR)

N13 Kuang



Moving into the belt of the Klang Valley proper we come to an area that played a crucial role in its historical development. Home of the peaceful Malaysia Bible Seminary, Kuang town has clearly seen better days, but it used to be a transport hub for the coal mined in Batu Arang to the north which saw use all across the region. The coal came down a railway specially constructed for that purpose by the British in 1915; commercial services also ran until they were discontinued in 1971.

Batu Arang isn’t in this seat but is the nucleus of burgeoning communities that are, including the new township of Bandar Tasik Puteri, and factories in Kundang on the railway line are also seeing a new lease of life as industry trickles back to this part of the state, bringing workers with it. In point of fact the Kuang seat is tied for highest share of voters under 30% among all state assembly seats in the country (this does not include inmates of Sungai Buloh prison which is located at the southwestern corner of the constituency).

Obviously this does not bode well for UMNO, whose hemorrhaging of the youth vote is very firmly substantiated at this point. Their assignee is Hasnal Reza Merican Habib Merican, a member of Malaysia’s human rights commission whose work is nominally incompatible with direct political involvement and has attracted calls by a good-government group for him to step down. Bersatu has given their Sungai Buloh division chief Mohd Rafiq Mohd Abdullah the mandate to recapture the seat after their 2018 victor Sallehudin Amiruddin defected to Pejuang. Despite Pejuang not contesting the elections, Sallehudin himself is recontesting as an independent.

I think going forward it will become obvious when a seat is going to fall or hold. Is it alright with everyone if we end with the candidate lists from now on and skip straight to the conclusion? PN gain from Pejuang

N14 Rawang



“Rawang” referred to the swamp forests that blanketed the area before any immigrants came. Its history has correspondingly been bound up in what comes out of the ground here, of which there are many examples.

There was tin, abundant in this region, which made Rawang an early hub of mining activity. The Rawang Tin Mining Company was eventually taken over by two entrepreneurs, Loke Yew and K. Thamboosamy Pillai, who later installed the country’s first electric generator in the mines of Rawang and extended their supply to Rawang town. There was coal, discovered in the Batu Arang area at the turn of the century and much in demand during the World Wars by very different occupying powers. The mine shut down in 1960 and its operator Malayan Collieries ceased to exist in 1968; the miners who fostered industrial activism here have largely disappeared. There was cement, produced at the country’s first industrial-scale plant in Rawang with limestone from Batu Arang. There was rubber, responsible for the substantial Indian vote that hangs on here.

A postscript to the electricity legacy in the area occurred when TNB’s plan to construct electric cable towers, in response to a 2005 national power cut, met with resistance from villagers in the area and was eventually rerouted after the newly elected state government stalled the project in 2008. One of the lawyers in the saga was William Leong, who would win a legacy UMNO parliamentary seat that same year and still serves as the local MP.

The waters broke in Rawang state constituency at the same time with Gan Pei Nei wresting the seat for PKR. She was the subject of some controversy around reselection time in 2018 and was replaced (out of an abundance of caution, so the official narrative goes) with then-Selangor PKR Youth secretary Chua Wei Kiat. Chua has graduated to state PKR deputy information chief and has PKR’s blessing to contest again; he has a straight fight with Rejean Kumar Ratnam of Bersatu’s non-Malay supporters’ wing. PH hold

N15 Taman Templer



Gerald Templer needs no introduction, but this botanic name for a botanic seat deserves a little more said about it. Though most of its population lives in the relatively new Selayang town, off to the northwest covering most of the seat’s land area are Taman Templer and Bukit Lagong. Forest reserves are few and far between in the Klang Valley and these two, in addition to their obvious ecologic value and status as Orang Asli land, also help to mitigate flooding risks in nearby built-up areas.

Both are under threat from development. In a pattern that has been repeated elsewhere, Amirudin’s state government recently went around its own moratorium on deforestation and sold roughly 35% of the Bukit Lagong reserve off to logging and quarrying companies. Two are state-owned, managed by Amirudin himself, and several more have ties to Selangor’s royals and members of gang Azmin. The state forestry department also has its finger in the pie because of course. Much side-eyeing has been made in the direction of Amirudin whose electoral base lies directly to the east, surrounded by more of that tempting greenery.

The seat used to be green in another sense. PAS was the first to take this seat away from UMNO in 2013 before they themselves were knocked out by the current incumbent, Mohd Sany Hamzan of Amanah. Sany will not recontest the seat; he was elected MP for Hulu Langat in November and is presumably busy with that. After being tipped to contest Hulu Kelang in her father’s place, Ampang municipal councillor Anfaal Saari is being sent across the highway in Sany’s place. She faces Sany’s predecessor in the seat, Zaidy Abdul Taib of PAS, who notched second place in the 2018 polls. Selangor student bureau deputy Aida Nazeera Abdul Rahman of MUDA completes the three-corner fight. One of these resumes is not like the other. PN gain from PH

[Joseph Cao]

Parliament: P098 Gombak (PH-PKR)

N16 Sungai Tua



We will get to the Sungai Tua in this name shortly, but first a visit is due to Batu Caves. These caves in the limestone hills north of Kuala Lumpur are a beloved site for Hindus thanks to our friend K. Thamboosamy Pillai, who dedicated a temple within the caves in 1890. Successive caretakers of the temple built stairs up to the caves, turning them into an accessible tourist attraction and festival site. This is a still-growing residential area that has swallowed up the Malay and Indian villages left over from last century’s rubber estates, through which the Batu river, named for the caves, flows en route to Kuala Lumpur. So Batu Caves was the appellation for this state constituency prior to the 2018 redelineation.

Sungai Tua, a tributary of the Batu river, no longer exists. The village currently named Sungai Tua is another product of the Emergency-era evacuation; its Malay residents left their paddy fields and orchards behind and settled further south, and their lands were compensated for in their new location. Both the river and the village were drowned by the 1987 construction of the Batu Dam. It’s the gateway to Selangor’s state park, which includes campsites and waterfalls and a recreational forest named for the submerged river. This covers the entire remainder of the seat and provided its new name.

In the first and most strongly PH of three high-profile fights under the Gombak parliamentary seat, incumbent menteri besar Amirudin Shari of PKR is standing for a fourth term. His principal challenger is Muhammad Hanif Jamaluddin, the Selangor PAS Youth deputy chief and a special officer to PAS commissioner Ahmad Yunus Hairi. This is not a straight fight because independent Suman Gopal is returning to the seat after contesting Batu Caves in 2013 to the tune of 182 votes. PH hold

N17 Gombak Setia



The forest spills east into Gombak Setia. This seat is essentially coterminous with the Setapak area, so named because it was “one step” away from Kuala Lumpur, though there is still a substantial Orang Asli population away from the cities in the part of the seat stretching north to Gunung Bunga Buah and east to the Klang Gates. It is anchored by Gombak town which appears to be a terminally boring place going by the description of Gombak on the Selangor tourism website, because all of Gombak’s points of attraction are well outside Gombak town itself. In point of fact the only notable thing in this seat appears to be the International Islamic University of Malaysia, which is surely an indicator of something.

Gombak Setia’s incumbent, former Azmin secretary Hilman Idham, is extremely “setia” as we have discovered at least since he followed his boss into PPBM. Unlike Azmin he is unimpeachably heterosexual to the extent of being linked to rape claims and suing an activist over talking about the claims. Hilman was the first PKR candidate to win here; PAS held the seat in 1999 and then in 2008 and 2013, signalling a rather deeper PAS DNA here than in the other Gombak seats. Hilman clearly feels there is a fighting chance to hold the seat even as Amirudin carried it on his way to becoming Gombak MP last year.

Hilman faces a rematch with UMNO’s Gombak chief Megat Zulkarnain Omardin, also a Senator and the state BN chief, who contested in this seat in 2018 and in Gombak last year; he has always stressed the fact that he is a local boy born in Gombak Setia itself. Fourth time is the charm, as no one has ever said. Bringing up the rear is independent Mohamed Salim Mohamed Ali, the chairman of a local nonprofit.

All I will say here is that I think this seat will swing whichever way Hulu Kelang swings. It is after all a very loyal seat. PN hold

N18 Hulu Kelang



It is not too much of a stretch to delineate the history of Selangor by its five rivers. The Bernam and Lukut rivers mark its northern and southern boundaries. The Selangor and Langat rivers were important travel and trade routes whose hinterlands still mark the eastern reaches of the state. Slashing across this canvas is a wide valley defined by the final and most prominent river of the five, the Klang River, covering most of Selangor and the locus of industry, commerce, and development in Malaysia even today.

Bukit Tabur, Klang Gates, and its dam mark the area where this river rises. It is dangerous territory for some – Bukit Tabur has been permanently closed to the public since a spate of deaths and injuries there. The highway makes for a neat division of Hulu Kelang from the rest of the Ampang municipal area, but it does create a long tail in the south covering the Taman Keramat area (facing the Kuala Lumpur neighborhood of Dato' Keramat) where around half its population resides.

Amanah incumbent Saari Sungib served the area diligently for three terms, two under the PAS banner, and has bowed out due to an onset of Parkinson’s which made his constituency duties difficult to carry out. Initially his daughter Anfaal Saari was tipped to contest here having also been active on the ground as an Ampang municipal councillor. But Anwar has engineered a party swap with PKR in his most high-profile intervention so far: Bukit Melawati assemblywoman and PKR up-and-comer Juwairiya Zulkifli has been reassigned here – her mother’s home is here and she grew up in the seat.

This puts Juraiwiya up against her political grandfather Azmin, himself a reassignment from the less Malay-heavy Bukit Antarabangsa. Azmin was the one who broke the UMNO chokehold here in 1999, becoming Selangor’s first PKR assemblyman, but in subsequent elections it was given to PAS who eventually won the seat with Saari. In other seats with intimidating majorities for PH, this PAS DNA has been tipped as a potential determining factor.

As a result this is unmistakably the premier contest of Selangor. The national media have descended on the poor residents of Hulu Kelang and their coverage can best be summarized as follows: it is a must-win seat for PN who don’t have a real leader aside from Azmin who can lead PN in the assembly; it is also a must-win seat for Azmin, whose future in Bersatu potentially depends on whether he can perform in the polls; Juwairiya is doing her best to raise her profile. Azmin does retain influence in the Taman Keramat neighborhoods – as you can see from the map he won most of them last year – and it could very well swing things in his direction. PN gain from PH


Parliament: P099 Ampang (PH-PKR)

N19 Bukit Antarabangsa



There is a great view from this seat’s perch in the foothills of the Titiwangsa Range. While the seat also covers Ampang-area villages of lower income nearer to the city boundary, and a link through neighborhoods of middle- to high-end apartment blocks, the Bukit Antarabangsa residential area is fairly rich and is home to a lot of local celebrities and up-and-comers of the Klang Valley scene. For these reasons it has long attracted attention from property developers with the ability to smell money.

You will not be surprised to hear that this is an area infamous for landslides and consequent accidents, most notably the 1993 Highland Towers collapse which killed at least 48 residents after an apartment block’s foundations were destabilized. The principal responsible for the foundations’ design fled the country. In fact pretty much all of the tragedies can be attributed to shoddy planning and overdevelopment of the hillside slopes. Under the newly elected state government, the city council set up a Slope Management Action Plan in 2009. Considering the ongoing development in the area it is a very questionable action plan indeed.

The incumbent in this snake-shaped seat is noted snake Azmin Ali, the Selangor PN chairman, who has held the seat since 2008 and blown its majorities out. Now that he’s left the party he has concluded that this is too hot for him to hold and is decamping north to a seat with a Malay supermajority; defending for Bersatu is its communications director Sasha Lyna Abdul Latif who bagged a distant second place when running for the Ampang parliamentary seat last year. PKR’s elections director in the seat, Mohd Kamri Kamaruddin, is the main challenger. At the top of the ballot paper, though almost certainly bottom of the vote count, MUDA communications director and Shah Alam resident Melanie Ting has a background in constitutional law and volunteer work. PH gain from PN

N20 Lembah Jaya



Kuala Lumpur’s history has been extensively discussed. What attracted the Klang sultanate up their eponymous river was the tin deposits east of the confluence where the first miners disembarked. The Ampang new village, where many of the miners put down roots, still stands at its boundary which swerves to take in the Ampang Malay villages nearby. There is some room to discuss the origin of Lembah Jaya as a name for the neighborhoods that sprung up to their east, since the terrain here is somewhat valley-like as it slopes up to the Ampang forest reserve. But it would not be an exaggeration of the area’s historic importance if it was ultimately named for the Lembah Klang whose development can be traced back to the mining that took place here.

There is something of a women’s electoral legacy in the area. Zuraida Kamaruddin represented Ampang for three terms and attracted a field of women challengers in GE15. Her successor as PKR women’s wing chief, Haniza Talha, is the incumbent in this seat and generally very close to the older woman’s operation, having followed Zuraida from PKR to Bersatu to PBM and been suspended by PBM president Larry Sng for taking Zuraida’s side in the PBM internal war. Given that, and PBM’s decision to sit out these elections, it should be no surprise that Haniza is not recontesting.

Carrying on the women’s theme Sharifah Haslizah Syed Ariffin, the PAS Ampang information chief and Ampang municipal councillor who stood in Bukit Antarabangsa last election, has her party’s nomination here this time and is hoping to regain an urban seat for PAS. She joins Sasha Lyna as an all-female PN slate for Zuraida’s former parliamentary seat.

This is where the theme ends. PKR’s choice to regain the seat for themselves is their Ampang chief Syed Ahmad Syed Abdul Rahman, better known in his rap and songwriting career by his stage name Altimet. He produced the PH campaign song in GE15, a rather different contribution that election from his initial hope to be given the mandate to contest against Zuraida, which ultimately went to Batu Tiga assemblywoman Rodziah Ismail. Altimet is not releasing a new song for this election. PH gain from PBM


Parliament: P100 Pandan (PH-PKR)

N21 Pandan Indah



Kuala Lumpur nominally stopped growing when its boundaries were fixed, but communities have a habit of leaping those boundaries. There used to be a squatter area just inside what would become the boundary, much in favor with people who wanted proximity to the capital, a desire for upward mobility that prompted its name change from Kampung Najis (named for a nearby drain) to Kampung Pandan. The mushrooming of housing projects with the Pandan moniker continued with Desa Pandan (1985), then spilled over onto the Selangor side on the strength of that upmarket label with Pandan Jaya and Pandan Indah, for which the seat is named. A common complaint in the area is its susceptibility to flash flooding after heavy rains, usually because the drains are blocked or otherwise not draining water quickly enough.

There has been some noticeable reduction in drain blockages under incumbent Izham Hashim, the Selangor Amanah chairman, who has served the area in various capacities for twenty years; he took on the then-Selangor PAS leader Iskandar Abdul Samad on his home turf in 2018 and won convincingly. This more than anything else was the nail in PAS’s coffin in 2018 as they lost their urban vote, carrying candidate after candidate to third-place finishes in their incumbent seats. It is a trend they are very eager to reverse this time.

Izham is running for reelection. PN seems to understand that PAS’s star has waned in urban seats but Bersatu’s candidate is not exactly a model of what urban voters want; they have nominated Fazil Mohamad Dali, a former bodybuilder and self-described “reformed gangster” better known as Ayahanda Cik Ton from his more infamous days, who now chairs a welfare association. MUDA’s Bandar Tun Razak deputy chief Noor Faralisa Redzuan supposedly works in a bank but her digital presence is nil and I have been unable to independently confirm this. Independent Sivaneswaran Ramasundram completes the ballot paper; he used to be a local branch chairman for PH and leads a charity organization in Pandan. PH hold

N22 Teratai



Much of the flat land that marks former mining areas continues down into what is now southern Ampang, land of quiet and unobtrusive housing linked by highways that are neither, with a reasonably calm and low-profile laundry list of constituency issues to go with it. It is so low-profile I haven’t been able to dig up its prior history at all. Whatever story lies behind the name of Bukit Teratai has clearly been lost with its makeover into one of the many housing estates in the area. Development has however brought the houses up into the hilly terrain that graduates into mountains further to the east, and the landslide ailment has spread into this part of Ampang to widespread consternation.

Teratai itself is a relatively new state constituency, created in 2004, with a new assemblyman installed at every election. Bryan Lai Wai Chong is the fifth. Having won on the DAP ticket in 2018 he resigned from the party after being accused of marital infidelity, saying he wanted to protect DAP’s image, then promptly linked up with Warisan’s nascent network in Peninsular Malaysia.

It is fair to say that the Sabah-based party was not terribly successful here in GE15. Now that Shafie Apdal’s party is outflanked in its own backyard and in a government with PH, Warisan is hardly in a position to contest these elections on its own. Lai knows this firsthand, having come a very distant sixth (and lost his deposit) as the Warisan candidate for Ampang last year even as the party’s star candidate Ong Tee Keat fell flat on his face in his former electoral base in this seat.

So the contest to become the sixth Teratai assemblyman in as many elections is nominally a free-for-all. But in typical quiet fashion for this seat it has whittled down to a straight fight: DAP’s pick to regain the seat is Ampang municipal councillor Yew Jia Haur, who also holds a leadership position in the KL party chapter; he claims his work on the council will allow him to have some continuity in his plans to benefit the area, to offset the revolving door of his predecessors. Brand strategist Chew Han Keai is carrying the Bersatu banner, though his supposed expertise is not reflected in the marketing and design of his campaign materials. PH gain from Warisan


Parliament: P101 Hulu Langat (PH-Amanah)

N23 Dusun Tua



Hulu Langat district lies in a secluded corner of the state. The eponymous town has some of this but is more popularly known for its durians, a legacy that goes back to its founding with the initial exploration of Sungai Langat. Even back then there were durian and other fruit orchards here that served as a gathering point for nomads. One especially old durian tree gave the community, and by extension this seat, its name.

It is a fair name in some respects as regards the hinterlands of the seat in outlying areas of northern Hulu Langat district. A substantial part of its population however lives in the Selangor part of Cheras, an older and more secure part of town than the Hong Kong tower blocks of its KL counterpart; here are Hakka restaurants that can count decades on the premises and secluded hiking trails behind housing estates. Though the average age of its population certainly makes it “tua” in another sense.

DAP incumbent Edry Faizal Eddy Yusof, the best rapper in the state assembly, won the seat off PAS in 2018. PAS itself broke an UMNO streak in the seat in 2013 and UMNO wanted this seat back for obvious reasons, probably not least because Edry Faizal has vocally butted heads with local UMNO and is a Malay DAP member and we all know how BN/PN feel about that. By the sound of it, this was a very late development in seat negotiations; DAP gave the seat up to UMNO on condition that it be allowed to nominate a non-assemblyman for the speakership if PH+BN forms Selangor’s next state government. Like Semenyih, where DAP was PH’s assigned constituency coordinator and had the most presence on the ground, the loss of this seat to UMNO has the potential to rankle activists.

It remains to be seen what effect this has on the prospects of UMNO candidate Johan Abdul Aziz, former assemblyman for Semenyih next door until he was knocked out in 2018. Johan has remained active across the entire Hulu Langat district. After initial buzz about their Hulu Langat chief Mohd Radzi Abdul Latif, Bersatu have nominated Azhar Hambali. To my knowledge he had previously left Bersatu and applied to join Pejuang ahead of GE15 along with a group of about 700 Dusun Tua members, which surely deserves some sort of award for worst-timed political instinct. Hoping to capitalize on the DAP/UMNO substitution, Selangor MUDA chief and UK-trained architect Al Hafiz Ikhwan will contest here. PN gain from PH

N24 Semenyih



Semenyih is as quiet as the river which flows through the seat. Its name originates from the “hiding” (in Negeri Sembilan dialect) which fugitives are said to have done here in the aftermath of the area’s cession to the Selangor Sultanate. Communist fighters did in fact hide here during the Emergency. Nowadays the economic activity is focused in areas like service industries and tourism; progress has been creeping in slowly without substantially disrupting its peacefulness. Whether that can continue on its current course – and what effect it will have on the former new village, the new affordable housing spreading around it, the far-flung farms, the border towns and ecotourism magnet of Broga Hill – is a question the area will have to grapple with.

Novelty ribbed me last time for not mentioning Starfleet captain Michelle Yeoh in my preview even while giving a shoutout to Bridget Welsh, who operates out of the University of Nottingham campus here. Semenyih does have its own presence in science fiction: it is the name of a planet in the tabletop war game BattleTech. Odds are that this is intentional because Malaysians are canon to the BattleTech universe, thanks to their role in settling the planet Kanderstag where the inhabitants still speak what appears to be Manglish; unsurprisingly they inherited Malaysian property developers’ predilection for swanky European names when deciding what to name their planet.

On our own planet, Zakaria Hanafi won a high-profile by-election for UMNO in 2019 after the death of the Bersatu incumbent Bakhtiar Mohd Nor, the first recovery of lost electoral ground since UMNO’s 2018 massacre which saw this seat leave UMNO hands for the first time ever. But Zakaria has one of the worst social media presences of any incumbent in the assembly and he is not standing again.

UMNO has nominated its Hulu Langat women’s wing chief Wan Zulaika Anua to replace him; the bank worker is involved in several parent-teacher associations in Kajang and a residents’ association in Semenyih. PN is eager to recover lost electoral ground for the coalition and has put up Selangor PAS information chief Nushi Mahfodz, whose 2018 candidacy in neighboring Sungai Ramal is the exception to a funny little pattern we will get to shortly. He also works as a lecturer in syariah law at the International Islamic University based nearby. PN gain from BN

[Joseph Cao]

P102 Bangi (PH-DAP)

N25 Kajang



The Temuan living in what would become Kajang made their rooftops by folding the palm leaves that grow abundantly in this area, from which the town derives its name. Mining was the first major draw for the outside world. It was a primarily Chinese endeavor, expanding into Semenyih and Broga, though the tin petered out early before the 20th century and a succession of agricultural enterprises followed: tobacco, coffee, rubber. Judging from the town today its most successful export is the satay developed by a local man, whose original restaurant still stands across the street from Kajang train station at the terminus of its MRT line. There are historic building preservation efforts ongoing here which are only slightly hampered by Kajang’s comparatively recent history.

This seat has recent history for the Pakatan parties too. Tan Seng Giaw was the only opposition member to withstand the BN landslide of 1990, winning here even as he continued to hold down his Kepong parliamentary seat until 2018. Less gloriously this is the site of the infamous Kajang Move, a plan to have the incumbent Kajang assemblyman give way for Anwar in a by-election, which saw Khalid Ibrahim’s fall from grace and a round of internal manoeuvring resulting in Azmin Ali’s appointment as menteri besar at the expense of newly elected Kajang assemblywoman Wan Azizah (who was substituted in for Anwar after his second sodomy conviction kiboshed the plan).

PKR incumbent Hee Loy Sian is a reassignee from Parliament, having served in a Petaling Jaya seat prior to taking over Kajang from Wan Azizah in 2018. He is the face of some of the state government’s oddest decisions as its environment and indigenous affairs executive councillor, and has attracted more flak than usual for PKR. It is understandable that he has not been reselected. PKR’s replacement is David Cheong Kian Young, a member of the state party’s central committee. Second on the ballot, with even less social media presence, is Bersatu’s Liew Sin Kim. Arutchelvan Subramaniam, the deputy chief of PSM, is easily the loudest candidate in the media but is guaranteed to lose his deposit in his maiden electoral outing. PH hold

N26 Sungai Ramal



Bandar Baru Bangi, of the large roundabouts and modern-looking “green mosque” Masjid al-Hasanah, has overshadowed the original Bangi near the Negeri Sembilan border. In between the two towns is a sleepy patchwork of close-knit and agriculture-driven villages, where dogs snooze at bus stops and cows graze under electricity pylons. This used to be Selangor’s backyard and back in 1977 it was considered the perfect place to stick the Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia (UKM) campus.

It is most commonly theorized that Bangi derives from “bangai" or “dismissed” which was the appellation for palace residents who were dismissed from the Sultan’s presence in Klang. They settled by what is now called the Bangi river, Selangor’s backyard even back then. Local industry, mostly farming and fishing, was diversified by the sprawling West Country rubber (and later palm oil) estate to the north; it opened in 1905 and was acquired by the Tun Abdul Razak government from 1972 onward. This was where a new town was to be built, a model of Islamic practice and living to house UKM employees within commuting distance of the new campus (itself built on land which the indigenous Temuan tribe was forced to evict). The new town commonly known as BBB grew slowly but singlemindedly, with final construction ending in 2007.

It is fair to say that reputation has impacted the area's politics. When it eventually left UMNO hands in 2013 it was PAS which picked up the Bangi state seat. The seat was renamed Sungai Ramal in 2018 after a tributary of Sungai Langat, by way of a village to the north of BBB. It was picked up by Amanah that election courtesy of Mazwan Johar, who has served quietly and may not be in the best of positions to stem the PAS tide – the PAS candidate carried this seat at the same time DAP’s Syahredzan Johan was sweeping to a landslide in the parliamentary contest.

Mazwan has opted to defend the seat. PAS’s Mohd Shafie Ngah, the Kajang municipal councillor who flipped Bangi in 2013, is challenging. This means residents of the area will, for the fourth time in five elections, have the option to vote for a PAS candidate named Shafie, and the only reason it’s not five out of five is because Mohd Shafie did not contest in 2018. Expect the voters here to pick that option. PN gain from PH

N27 Balakong



Like most other areas there are both Malay and Chinese villages, four of the former and five of the latter, along the Balak river – named for the villagers’ habit of floating logs downriver to be sold – but the “kong” addition is Hakka and reflects the Chinese inhabitants’ prominence even then. This was one of the very few Chinese settlements in Selangor in the mid-19th century before the migration waves, thanks to the tin mines nearby. There is still a strong Hakka presence in Balakong’s new village. Of course the villages have long since burst their boundaries and sprawled out into unending housing and commercial estates, each one grayer than the next.

Kajang DAP has a strong local reputation that was exemplified by the insane work ethic of Eddie Ng, who won the seat in 2013 after DAP wrested it from MCA grandee Hoh Hee Lee in 2008. Months into his second term he was killed in a traffic accident while driving to his constituency office after midnight. Vivian Wong Siew Ki won the resulting 2018 by-election; she belongs, borrowing a term from DAP’s Singaporean forebears, to a sort of young 4G cohort in the party that looks up to their mentors and most especially the “captain” whose legacy they recently commemorated on the fifth anniversary of his death.

Vivian has been sent next door to contest in Seri Kembangan. Keeping with the youth theme, Selangor DAP Youth chief Ong Chun Wei is replacing her on the ballot; he faces Steven Lai Choon Wen of Bersatu in a straight fight. PH hold


Parliament: P103 Puchong (PH-DAP)

N28 Seri Kembangan



A drive up the North-South Expressway shows exactly where the Kuala Lumpur conurbation begins and the comparative quiet of places like Bangi is left behind. The concrete mushrooms up again the moment you come to the sites of former new villages; we saw this in Ampang, we will see it again in the Petaling Jaya area, and it is on full display as you arrive at Seri Kembangan, the largest Chinese new village in the country, constructed from scratch during the Emergency. By its end in 1962 there were over 2000 houses – 2500 a few years later – most of them constructed from scratch, and since then the local transplants from Sungai Besi and points south have lived up to the name of “kembang” or growth.

This carries on the legacy of their mining forebears who flocked to the area for its tin. Their concerns have shifted from wealth to health: where there was once the largest open-pit tin mine in the world at Hong Fatt Mines north of the villages now stands the self-proclaimed Mines Wellness City attracting patrons from all over the Klang Valley. Seri Kembangan was the first new village to get an official JKKK, or village progress committee, in 1985. Government interest in the area, as we will see, has always been high.

Incumbent Ean Yong Hian Wah, the former state DAP chairman, has served three quiet terms as assemblyman here and is not contesting again. His pending nomination as Port Klang Authority chairman has ruffled some feathers inside and outside of the seat but that is unlikely to rebound on Balakong incumbent Wong Siew Ki who has been reassigned here by the party.

Her main opponent, Ken Liau Wei Jian of Bersatu, is a transplant from Hulu Selangor; businessman Edwin Chen (last seen losing his deposit in Bukit Bintang last year) was initially slated to contest here off of his closer local ties, but has nonetheless been helping Liau on the campaign trail. Meanwhile a local MCA public complaints bureau chief, Wong Jung Lik, is unhappy with MCA’s decision to sit out the elections and broader subservience to PH and is making his complaint public by running as an independent. PH hold

N29 Seri Serdang



Seri Serdang grew out of the post-Emergency plan to aid growth in the surrounding communities by providing more local housing and work opportunities. This first housing estate (named after the pokok serdang growing throughout the area) was erected in 1977 alongside state-developed industrial land. Cottage industry was an early benefactor; in the early 1980s Serdang made 60% of shoe products in the country. In its current incarnation the seat stretches west beyond the Ayer Hitam Forest Reserve to some newer Puchong housing estates in the suburbs; it previously covered part of Puchong itself.

In general the area has been of interest to civil servants and businesses who note its location between KL and Putrajaya, with strong transport links to both. The new MRT Putrajaya rail line trundles south and west through the constituency en route to Cyberjaya. Seri Serdang is also bisected by the Damansara-Puchong Highway with small villages on both sides, and as a result constituency work here is unusually arduous by the standards of an urban seat.

Amanah’s Siti Mariah Mahmud served as the Kota Raja MP for two terms (winning under the PAS label) before landing this state seat in 2018 by defeating two of its former incumbents from UMNO and PAS. The Amanah women’s wing chief is retiring from politics after a fruitful career serving both sides of the highway, with a particular focus on the villagers’ concerns including securing land titles. Replacing her is former Subang Jaya city councillor Abbas Salimi Azmi, where he managed the traditional Malay villages in the area; he also serves as a deputy Youth chief in the national party.
 
Seeing as this ticks two important boxes for candidate cred we will see how he performs against his two opponents on the ballot paper, who nominally outrank him in each of those respects. Bersatu have put up their Selangor information chief and Puchong division chief Mohd Shukor Mustaffa (strangely PAS’s prior comments about fielding an ustaz here have not come to pass). And MUDA cofounder and secretary-general Amir Hariri Abdul Hadi is arguably his party’s biggest gun in the state as a longtime activist in the area.

We will pause at this point to consider the case of Kuan Chee Heng aka Uncle Kentang, an even more nationally renowned activist also operating in the area, who lost his deposit contesting Puchong in GE15. Amir is of course not an independent and has plenty of resources behind him; nevertheless, the two-party duopoly is as real here as anywhere else in Selangor and the MUDA leader is surely aware that the same oblivion awaits his party if he and others can’t perform on Saturday. PH hold


Parliament: P104 Subang (PH-PKR)

N30 Kinrara



We have left the Puchong parliamentary constituency but haven’t talked about Puchong yet. That is because it falls here, in an area formerly covered by rubber estates and tin mines. The neighborhood of Kinrara is named after one of the former rubber estates whose land it occupies, and as with most other estates (Effingham? Seafield??) goodness only knows where its name in turn descended from. The Kinrara seat still has high capacity for growth and currently has 123,782 voters which makes it the largest constituency in the state. There are huge numbers of traffic problems too – Puchong is infamous as the land of tolls and traffic jams for a reason.

An especially key player in the area’s growth (and contributor to the horrible traffic) was the property developer IOI, which built Bandar Puchong Jaya and Bandar Puteri Puchong townships and several of the malls in the area. This became a talking point during GE15 when concerns were raised about Yeo Bee Yin’s candidacy for Puchong despite being married to the CEO of IOI. But as none of IOI’s developments fell under the currently drawn Puchong seat this was not a terribly substantive issue in the end.

One person to defend Yeo at the time was Selangor DAP secretary Ng Sze Han who has held this seat since 2013 and is running for a third term. He is relatively high-profile, having been the face of state policies like the Smart Selangor parking-payment app. Bersatu’s non-Malay wing has selected Wong Yong Kang, who like most of the party’s other non-Malay candidates has never run for office before but does at least give an address in the constituency, where he runs a food and beverage packaging business. PH hold

N31 Subang Jaya



For the record Subang Jaya is not the original Subang; that is the area up north beyond the airport of the same name, where the Petaling District land offices are still located, partly covered by a parliamentary that was named Subang until its 2018 renaming to Sungai Buloh. Subang Jaya is a newer township developed under the aegis of United Estate Properties, the property arm of Sime Darby. There were two stages to it: Subang Jaya itself, developed beginning in 1976, and UEP Subang Jaya (USJ) to its south, developed from 1988 onwards after the completion of Subang Jaya.

Today both areas are dotted with industrial parks and commercial projects, some of them proxies for other developers muscling into the township (looking at you Sunway). A slight alleviation of the infamous traffic congestion here is provided by the Kelana Jaya line extension which services the area heavily.

This was Hannah Yeoh’s seat for two terms, during which she raised the local standards of constituency work to an insane level, somehow managing to do so while serving as assembly speaker in her second term. She decamped for Segambut in 2018 to bring that work ethic to Parliament. Her replacement Michelle Ng Mei Sze is not quite up to that high standard but is doing a pretty good job regardless, and has been cleared to contest for a second term.

At 33, Michelle is the youngest DAP candidate running. Both her opponents are also pretty young: Bersatu non-Malay supporters’ wing vice-president Gana Pragasam Sebastian is a minor actor who gives an address in Damansara, and MUDA’s Selangor secretary Zayd Shaukat Ali has worked for a think-tank as a policy analyst in institutional reform.

As a postscript, youth itself does not appear to be a massive draw for voters. The number of postal ballots requested in this area has plummeted from GE15, when 2850 were requested for Subang; at last report a total of 1056 postal ballots were requested in Subang Jaya and Kinrara. This will not affect the outcome of either seat but this kind of precipitous drop in urban and non-Malay turnout would certainly benefit PN in nearly every other contest in the state. PH hold

[Joseph Cao]

Parliament: P105 Petaling Jaya (PH-PKR)

N32 Seri Setia



Before Nixon visited China, there was his visit to Malaysia. The year was 1953 and the site was Sungai Way new village, a settlement on a tributary of a tributary (Sungai Way flows into the much less prominent Sungai Penchala before it empties into the Klang River) mainly inhabited by tin and rubber workers until the Briggs Plan packed surrounding Chinese communities into the town. As the Federal Highway to Klang opened up a few years later it drew homes and industries alike into its orbit, with outlying areas of Petaling Jaya town giving way to Kelana Jaya and the automotive hub of Glenmarie near the Subang Airport. Since 1992 the name of Sungai Way itself has given way to Seri Setia.

The PKR man who broke this seat away from BN in 2008 was none other than Nik Nazmi Nik Ahmad, then the baby of the Selangor assembly, who later served as deputy speaker under Hannah Yeoh. During his first term he spearheaded a decently publicized project to improve education prospects for young residents of the Desa Mentari low-cost housing estate. This “Mentari Project” in a location full of social and security issues was moderately successful and there may or may not have been some residual goodwill benefiting PKR vice-president Shaharuddin Badaruddin who held the seat in 2018 as Nik Nazmi moved into Parliament.

Shaharuddin died of colon cancer soon after taking office, prompting a by-election which was held on a slight downward swing by Halimey Abu Bakar; his opponent was Halimah Ali, current MP for Kapar and autism conspiracy theorist. Halimey has a slightly dimmer star than his two predecessors did and it was not entirely a surprise when rumors began running around that he wouldn’t contest again. The replacement in Seri Setia is his fellow Selangor waste management board member Dr. Mohammad Fahmi Ngah of the Selangor Public Institute, who has a number of papers published on quality of life indicators in the state and has been described as looking like a budget Sylvester Stallone.

Fahmi’s primary opponent is Mohd Zubir Embong, who we have met before as an UMNO candidate: he lost to then-PAS MP Raja Kamarul Baharin for the Kuala Terengganu seat in 2008, lost to PAS’s Ahmad Amzad Hashim for the same seat in 2022, and was the candidate who submitted the evidence of PAS vote-buying which convinced the EC to nullify Ahmad Amzad’s win and trigger the Kuala Terengganu by-election, which will also happen on Saturday. Now Mohd Zubir is running on the other side of the country as a member of PAS. Wild!

There are two other candidates. MUDA’s Dobby Chew is an anti-death penalty activist with by far the most ridiculous name of anyone contesting this election, and I say this as someone who’s familiar with first names in Hong Kong. He has total assets of 174 ringgit, which in this economy is good for about two full refuels of the Honda Civic he’s currently paying off in loans. Independent Harindran Krishnan is a systems engineer in the railway industry, no doubt very useful knowledge for dealing with the Kelana Jaya Line running through the seat which has made headlines in recent years for all the wrong reasons. PH hold

N33 Taman Medan



Lying at the end of the Old Klang Road, Taman Medan, the namesake for this seat, is an outlier within Petaling Jaya. Disconnected from its metropolitan surroundings, there is a legacy of lower economic prospects that dates from its establishment in the 1970s, when squatter villagers from around Kuala Lumpur were deposited here in the 1970s in cramped public houses and flats. Recent media coverage has emphasized the cost of living issue here which is entirely fair. PKR incumbent Syamsul Firdaus Mohamed Supri is exceptionally anonymous but has been plugging away at small issues to help with these problems, including using individual rather than bulk meters to manage utility bill payments by individual residents in the high-rises dotting his mostly Malay constituency.

The area has a history of fertile ground for exploitation of racial and religious sentiments. Nearby Kampung Medan was the scene for deadly race riots in 2001 that spilled over into nearby Kampung Dato’ Harun – named after the UMNO chief minister of Selangor outside whose house the May 13, 1969 riots were triggered – and reached as far away as Sungai Way new village and Puchong. Six died and over a hundred were seriously injured, mostly poor Indian Malaysians. The incident was widely blamed on the slum conditions of the area and nothing was done to address the problem. UMNO officials were among the protesters who demanded a local church, located a stone’s throw away from the Mentari flats, remove its cross from outside its building in 2015. An outgunned PN captured neighborhoods in this area even as PKR’s Lee Chean Chung stormed to victory in the Petaling Jaya seat last November.

Bersatu can read election results as well as the rest of us and have decided this is a perfect opportunity to get a proper Malay fighter in the seat. None other than Bersatu’s disgraced Penang assemblyman Afif Bahardin, ringleader of the PKR defections in Penang and former contestant in Shah Alam, wants to capitalize on this. He has gone so far as to say he’s always secretly supported Selangor over Penang in football, cross his heart. Petaling Jaya city councillor and local boy Ahmad Akhir Pawan Chik has the PKR nomination, replacing the incumbent; his main policy push has been technical and vocational youth training to counter the high secondary school dropout rate in the area. PH hold

N34 Bukit Gasing



Petaling Jaya began life in 1953 as the Old Town, a collection of 800 wooden houses built to relieve overcrowding in Kuala Lumpur and curb the spread of squatter settlements. Its two main roads still stand as Jalan Templer and Jalan Othman. The advent of another road the following year, the Federal Highway, split the growing town in half; areas north of the highway became PJ Utara and those to its south became PJ Selatan. Meanwhile the Old Town and New Town (built during the Emergency, now known as PJ State) together straddle the boundary. This remains the beating heart of the city, with institutions from sixty or seventy years prior still active and serving the people.

The boundary between Petaling Jaya and its mother city runs through Bukit Gasing. This hill has since been designated one of the rare forest reserves within easy access of Kuala Lumpur. Hikers and joggers have been fixtures here for decades, coming up the hill via the major road of Jalan Gasing which claims the most number of churches on a single street in Malaysia. The seat named after the hill is drawn with surgical precision, taking in the lion’s share of the non-Malay polling districts in the area including the less Malay half of PJ Old Town.

DAP two-term incumbent and Hannah Yeoh protégé Rajiv Rishyakaran is extremely active and responsive in the seat and very vocal on living, health, and transport issues as part of his constituency work. His highest-profile action recently was his sponsorship of COVID tests at a time when they were very hard to get, for which many residents across the whole of Petaling Jaya are very grateful. Possibly the best DAP assemblyman, all in all. To top it off he is also notably focused on youth efforts as a member of DAP Socialist Youth.

Though that has not stopped MUDA from fielding a candidate against him. Local Chamber of Commerce deputy Raja Teagarajan, a multimillionaire and son of MIC strongman VKK Teagarajan, carries that party’s coupon, although there must be at least a few local MUDA members who regret it after Raja tweeted that voters should choose him as the “fitter” candidate over someone “leading an unhealthy life” – Rajiv is very recognizable locally, and in profile. The ballot is rounded out by Gerakan’s Nallan Dhanabalan, a former Ampang councillor who chairs the Klang chapter of PN. PH hold


Parliament: P106 Damansara (PH-DAP)

N35 Kampung Tunku



Originally a satellite town, Petaling Jaya eventually grew to need satellites of its own. The first land opened up for this purpose lay to the west of the city along Sungai Way in the direction of Subang. The first three neighborhoods developed, courtesy of SEA Housing Corp, were imaginatively designated SS1, SS2, and SS3 (the SS standing for Sungai Way–Subang rather than Section or SEA or something else), with SS1’s housing cooperative dedicated for civil servants and personally launched by the Father of the Nation. It was named Kampung Tunku Abdul Rahman for obvious reasons.

The “respectable” veneer has attended SSs 1 through 3 since their inception and now contributes to rampant hipsterism in the commerce and retail sectors that are the main economic activity of the seat covering these neighborhoods. It is a very small seat; the scope for even medium industry lies beyond this residential no-man’s land between PJ proper and the Petaling Jaya Utara spillover that stretches far to the north.

This is primarily attested to by the words of DAP incumbent Lim Yi Wei who, like fellow DAPSY alumnus Rajiv Rishyakaran, rose to the seat from the Petaling Jaya city council; she took over in 2018 from Lau Weng San who was sent south to the Banting seat. The insane DAP lean of the seat will stand her in good stead in the straight fight against Ruby Chin Yoke Kheng, Bersatu’s non-Malay sacrificial lamb who lost her deposit in Cheras last year. PH hold

N36 Bandar Utama



The biggest name associated with Bandar Utama is See Hoy Chan, which is not the name of a person – it’s the name of a business founded by Teo Hang Sam which grew during and after the Japanese occupation into a financial behemoth on the back of its trading in rice, sugar, and flour. The Rice King’s son Teo Soo Cheng subsequently dominated the property market in Selangor. In 1991 the See Hoy Chan Holdings Group won an opportunity to build a “green township” on a former palm oil estate, to the north of its already-successful Petaling Jaya estates Damansara Jaya and Damansara Utama. Each of these housing estates had been anchored by malls and business zones, but the new-built 1 Utama would go on to surpass them all and become the second-largest mall in the country.

The township was named Bandar Utama after the property firm that developed it. All these estates plus the Malay village of Sungai Kayu Ara and the Chinese village of Cempaka form the state constituency of the same name, and as you might expect from the methods of their inception they attracted a residency that skews heavily non-Malay. It’s not for nothing that this seat is deemed the safest seat for DAP, and thus PH in general, anywhere in the state.

DAP one-termer Jamaliah Jamaluddin holds the seat. Jamaliah happens to be the granddaughter of Communist Party leader Shamsiah Fakeh, which is barely salient compared to her previous work as PJ city councillor prior to assuming the seat in 2018 as its then-incumbent Yeo Bee Yin went south to Johor. Her constituency work has had a heavy emphasis on children and the elderly.

This is the kind of seat where it makes sense to list MUDA as the main challenger. The party has nominated Abe Lim Hooi Sean, who studied climate law in the UK and attended COP27 as a delegate and runs a plastics upcycling initiative; she flew back to Malaysia in June once elections were called. Surprisingly for the area Gerakan is running a Malay candidate, Nur Aliff Mohammad Tafid, an ex-UMNO Youth division chief who was last seen prostrating himself outside Najib’s house in 2018. Nur Aliff was named a candidate at the last minute by his own testimony, and his social media ground game is far behind his two rivals. PH hold

N37 Bukit Lanjan



It is interesting to note, but very typical of the seat, that Bukit Lanjan is named for a hill that does not actually fall within the constituency. The hill in question lies just inside the city boundary of Kuala Lumpur, and its original Temuan inhabitants were relocated to a village to the west which has taken the name in turn. Today they are one of the desperately poor pockets in the area left behind by the mushrooming concrete around them.

By a trick of state and federal development there is also a spaghetti bowl of highways leading directly into Kepong, Segambut, Kenny Hills, and other fashionable areas of Kuala Lumpur en route to the city center, and so this area is also studded with higher-end postcodes where many political and social high-rollers own homes, among them Bersatu secretary-general Hamzah Zainuddin whose home was raided earlier this year by the tax authorities. One of these is Bandar Sri Damansara, the only township in Petaling Jaya to use a Kuala Lumpur postcode.

PKR’s Elizabeth Wong used to chair the backbenchers’ club in the state assembly. In light of personal events it is highly understandable that she tends to avoid the limelight and do her job, carrying on the environmental activism that got her into politics, particularly as the face of assembly opposition to recent forest reserve degazettements. She has served three terms and has asked not to run again.

PKR women’s wing national secretary Loh Ker Chean was originally slated to contest in her place, and things got as far as campaign materials being prepared for the run, but last-minute changes to the PKR lineup were well reported at the time. As it happens neither contesting candidate lives in the constituency. Gerakan has selected Kepong resident Muniraa Abu Bakar, who specializes in financial literacy and actually served as PBM’s young women’s wing chief as recently as GE15. Defending for PKR is Gombak village coordinator Pua Pei Ling, a former aide to Rawang’s Gan Pei Nei. Pua has a very nice skeleton of a personal website that, like the unused campaign materials mentioned earlier, bears the imprint of professional design. PH hold


Parliament: P107 Sungai Buloh (PH-PKR)

N38 Paya Jaras



The issue of flooding is everpresent in Selangor, even away from the big-name rivers. Flowing north into this area we have the Subang river, which joins Sungai Buloh and its tributary Sungai Kedondong just west of Paya Jaras village. A little further down they are joined by Sungai Plong flowing south from the vicinity of Kuang. All these rivers and their tributaries contribute to the swampy mangrove-studded land from which Paya Jaras takes its name, the site of villages and townships which are still frequently flooded to this day. There are plans by the state government to widen the rivers and improve drainage which would not come a moment too soon.

Lying as they do within the Sungai Buloh parliamentary seat, site of heroic electoral overperformance by Khairy Jamaluddin, Paya Jaras (which KJ carried) and neighboring Kota Damansara were both eyed by UMNO during seat talks. At one point this was rumored to go to federal minister Tengku Zafrul whose maiden electoral outing took place in Kuala Selangor immediately to the west. But that has not transpired and PKR has retained both seats, though it faces the more difficult fight in this one.

The incumbent and state exco Mohd Khairuddin Othman has been gearing up to defend the seat after winning it twice under two different party labels. He won in 2013 on his second try as a member of PAS, then crossed over to PKR in a high-profile defection before expanding his margin very slightly in 2018. His main challenger this time is PAS’s Abdul Halim Tamuri, former rector of the Selangor Islamic University. There is also independent Nurhaslinda Basri, who took 113 votes in her Sungai Buloh run last year. PH hold

N39 Kota Damansara



It’s finally time to visit the original Subang town, named for a fishing village at the meeting point of the Pelumut and Damansara rivers settled by Javanese immigrants in the 1930s. The story goes that while catching fish the local fishermen used to net earrings (subang) worn by the women living further upriver. As the settlement expanded north it hit another river which took the same name.

Subang was very abruptly shaken up a generation later by the Emergency, which established Subang new village, and the construction of the Sultan Abdul Aziz Shah Airport on its doorstep to the south. A further shakeup in the area occurred in the 1990s when a new township was constructed from scratch and hopefully given the name Kota Damansara, in view of the area’s rapid development and its proximity to the source of the Damansara river. The seat taking in all these communities is highly disparate, crossing racial lines and income brackets, and the issues important to residents are aggressively local and vary from neighborhood to neighborhood.

The seat has seen a succession of unusual contests over the past several cycles. PSM won their only state assembly representation in 2008 with Pakatan Rakyat’s support, but as the coalition frayed going into GE13 PAS went rogue and fielded a candidate of their own in the seat, throwing it into UMNO hands. This made the UMNO incumbent a sitting duck in 2018 as PKR’s Shatiri Mansor pulled a majority of the vote against UMNO, PAS, and PSM who unsuccessfully recontested the seat with their secretary-general Sivarajan Arumugam.

Rumors have swirled for months that Shatiri would be dropped after calls within PKR for a “more vibrant” presence in the seat. The originally drafted candidate was Aidi Amin Yazid, political secretary to local MP R. Ramanan; however other rumors that a PKR youth chief was being slated for the seat seem to have been borne out, and the eleventh-hour substitute (by Anwar himself!) is state PKR Youth chief and ex-Shah Alam councillor Izuan Kasim. Izuan seems to be controversial in that position – other party branches protested his appointment as Youth chief last year, including the Sungai Buloh branch – but Kota Damansara’s votes carried Ramanan over the finish line in November against the strongest imaginable UMNO challenge. So it would be foolish to bet against that pattern regardless of what previously happened in the fireworks factory of PKR. For their part PSM is not giving up on the seat and have fielded Sivarajan again, and Bersatu have put up Education Malaysia Global Services CEO Mohd Radzlan Jalaludin who hails from Subang village. PH hold

[Joseph Cao]

Parliament: P108 Shah Alam (PH-Amanah)

N40 Kota Anggerik



Shah Alam was the first planned city in Malaysia and primarily Malay land, thanks to the then-Sultan Salahuddin Abdul Aziz Shah decreeing it be developed as a Malay and Muslim residential town named after his late father Sultan Alam Shah. There are ostentatious reminders of proximity to political power with the state assembly and the menteri besar’s residence surrounded by clusters of massive bungalows. There is the largest mosque in the country, named for Sultan Salahuddin but popularly known as the Blue Mosque. There is a – by all accounts – pretty good public library. There are many many roundabouts. There are three cinemas, two of which opened within months of each other after the municipal government allowed hungry developers to go ahead and meet demand – but one of them is located far outside the city, in the vicinity of Subang Airport. Feedback is welcomed on whether it counts.

The second cinema is located in Setia Alam, the brainchild of SP Setia which bought the land off See Hoy Chan Holdings. SP Setia is very proud of their 2004 development, which is “green” in another sense – it has scooped multiple urban planning awards though that is not immediately obvious when viewed from the ground alongside dozens of other townships in the state. It is at any rate a good indicator of the future of Kota Anggerik, the City of Orchids. All this is taken in by the commendably compact state constituency of the same name.

Incumbent Najwan Halimi of PKR, a former Anwar aide, is one of his premier loyalists – the loyalty goes so far that Najwan was questioned by police in 2019 when a video was leaked that allegedly depicted Azmin engaging in sodomy. Given Anwar’s personal role in the seat assignments it’s not surprising that Najwan was renominated despite a leaked WhatsApp message in which he derided PSM as an “Indian estate party” with predictable blowback. Selangor PAS Youth chief Mohamed Sukri Omar has his party’s nomination to challenge the incumbent. And dispute resolution lawyer Azad Akbar Khan, who currently practices in the noted slums of Mont Kiara, will be MUDA’s representative in the dispute with Najwan. PH hold

N41 Batu Tiga



Batu Tiga began life as empty land to be traversed in between destinations to the north and east and destinations to the south and west. Its location along the Klang River, which forms the southern boundary of the seat, is no coincidence, because for the most part the destinations were Kuala Lumpur and Klang. From 1886 onward there was a government railroad connecting the two (still in service as KTM’s Port Klang line) and serving as a lifeblood of Klang’s heavy industry. The Kuala Lumpur–Klang road, opened in 1959, was upgraded to Malaysia’s first expressway in 1977 after Port Klang became the country’s new national port. Thus the name of this “third milestone” travelling out from Kuala Lumpur by either mode of transportation.

Thanks to these transport links the main destinations have shifted closer at hand to become Subang Jaya and Shah Alam. Batu Tiga used to be the site of the Shah Alam racing circuit, site of 35 years of Grand Prixes and motorcycle races until Khir Toyo’s government sold the land off to be converted into bland upscale suburbia. It is now anchored by the Subang Hi-tech Industrial Park, dropped in the comparatively empty lands beyond Subang Jaya as part of that town’s outward expansion.

As a consequence the Batu Tiga seat is one of the more outrageous products of the 2018 redelineation. It is long and thin and sprawls across three different administrative districts, stretching literally from the outskirts of Subang Jaya across Shah Alam’s riverfront to Klang city center, and its residents have complained plenty about the nightmare of constituency work within its boundaries.

Despite this, incumbent Rodziah Ismail of PKR has what residents call “a proven track record” stemming from her careful constituency work since winning the seat in 2008. In an eleventh-hour decision by Anwar himself, she will not be recontesting thanks to the seat swap with Hulu Kelang. The Ampang MP is nothing if not a team player; she has vowed to support her replacement, Selangor Amanah Youth chief Danial al-Rashid Haron, who is also a Shah Alam city councillor, an adjunct associate professor at Taylor’s University, and the son of veteran comedian Harun Salim Bachik. He’s placed care for special-needs children and the disabled high on his campaign agenda, drawing on his prior work in women and family development for the state administration.

It is therefore hard to imagine a better equipped candidate to face Bersatu’s Rina Mohd Harun, the former women, family, and community development minister and erstwhile Titiwangsa MP who is on her third carpetbag within six years. MUDA is running their Sham Alam deputy chief Saiyidah Izzati Nur Razak Maideen, better known as Cheda Razak, who also claims some expertise in the area – family development, not carpetbagging (as far as I can tell). She was one of MUDA’s early faces in dealing with the 2021 floods, to much better effect than Rina visiting a flood relief centre in high heels.

A while ago there was a report about PN being forced to field “undeserving” candidates in the state because of Selangor Bersatu being tied to gang Azmin. Rina is the most unacceptable of them all if her electoral record is anything to go by, and her being a “heavyweight” does not nullify that. PH hold


Parliament: P109 Kapar (PN-PAS)

N42 Meru



The Javanese influence is especially heavy as you get nearer to the coast. Kampung Meru, from which the seat draws its name, was founded around the turn of the century by settlers from the area around Mount Mahameru (the “world-mountain”) in Java. Early on this unobtrusive farming settlement managed to attract Chinese and Indian laborers whose descendants give the area its comparatively high non-Malay population.

Today Meru and nearby Kapar are tightening their links to the outside world (the Klang Sentral bus station is located here) and its industry and development, opening up new properties for the usual suspects like Sime Darby and building new hypermarkets and power plants. The locals as a whole remain less well-off than the inhabitants of nearby Setia Alam and Puncak Alam, and so the floods that hit all communities in western Selangor on the regular are that much more devastating to them.

This was an exceptionally strong PAS seat before Amamah’s Mohd Fakhrulrazi Mohd Mokhtar gained the seat for his party in 2018, and even then the PAS candidate who replaced its incumbent came within 300 votes of pipping UMNO for second place. As the safest, comparatively speaking, of PH’s winnings in Kapar in 2018 it is also being eyed by PN who will look to consolidate their hold on Halimah Ali’s seat. Mohd Fakhrulrazi joined PKR in 2020 much more amicably than the Sabak assemblyman did, which may or may not complicate matters for PH.

As the seat has been assigned back to its incumbent party of 2018, the defending candidate is Selangor Amanah vice-chairman Mariam Abdul Rashid, a former Shah Alam councillor. Hasnizam Adham was Sungai Besar Bersatu chief back in 2018. It’s not totally clear what position he holds now or if it’s local, but he has the Bersatu coupon to face Mariam nevertheless. PSM contested this seat in 2018 with a comparative heavyweight of former Kapar MP Manikavasagam Sundram, taking a little over one percent of the vote. He was set to contest Sentosa this round but no one knows what their vagaries of internal politics have yielded this time; here in Meru the party has named its workers’ bureau coordinator Sivaranjani Manickam as their candidate. PH hold

N43 Sementa



Kampung Sementa began life as another temporary stopping-point for Javanese fishermen venturing up the Klang river, which is reflected in “sementa" translating as “temporary” – yes this is another Tamparuli situation. The village was officially designated so in the late 19th century as it gradually expanded into the surrounding jungle. Today its primary transport links are to Klang although the northern reaches of the seat, running up the coast toward Jeram, fall into the Shah Alam metropolitan orbit. Then there is the Kapar power station on the coast, the largest in Malaysia, supplier of the voracious amounts of power demanded by the port city to its south.

Dr. Daroyah Alwi, the incumbent in this seat, is a Meru native who practiced dentistry before entering politics in the PKR camp under Azmin and Zuraida’s wing. She flipped a legacy UMNO seat in 2018. The then-PKR women’s wing deputy chief quit PKR in June 2020 following the suspension of her boss Haniza Talha. Daroyah also eventually joined Haniza in PBM, where she still serves as women’s wing chief; there are questions about their actual status in the party considering their support for Zuraida’s lost battle against Larry Sng for party president, but officially they remain members of PBM and are subject to the party’s decision not to contest in the state election.

In our final free-for-all the technically defending candidate is PKR’s division coordinator Erni Afrishah Azizi, the third-youngest candidate running in the state which is really saying something given MUDA’s substantial presence. She has had an active presence on the ground for some time if social media is anything to go by. This will be a straight fight against Noor Najhan Mohamad Salleh, the Kapar PAS chief, who contested in neighboring Meru in 2018. PN gain from PBM

N44 Selat Klang



Klang’s viability as a seaport owes much to the good geographical conditions of the coast around it. Pulau Klang and its attendant islands, including Pulau Indah, guard the mouth of the Klang River. The mudflats up and down the coast recede here, allowing free access to the river mouth. Most importantly the Klang Strait passing between the two of them is deep and conducive to the passage of all kinds of sea traffic which has been calling at Klang and its port since literal time immemorial.

At the southern tip of the Selat Klang seat stands the privatized Northport Industrial Estate, which handles liquid cargoes for the port ranging from palm oil products to industrial and specialty chemicals. In spite of – or because of – the nature of the work here and the direction the revenue flows, this is a desperately poor area, even more so post-COVID as the pandemic shuttered any itinerant jobs the locals might have held. This was responsible for pushing a lot of M40 residents over the line into the B40 category. Around 80% of the seat’s voters, mostly Malay, can be classified as urban poor.

This was no-go territory for PH parties until 2018. But it must be noted that Bersatu’s Abdul Rashid Asari barely unseated the PAS incumbent that year with a majority of exactly 500 votes; that incumbent was Halimah Ali, and this was the seat that put her over the top in the race for the Kapar parliamentary seat last year. Now that Abdul Rashid is standing for reelection under the PN banner it is probably not an exaggeration to label this Bersatu’s safest incumbent seat in the state. A fitting berth for the Selangor Bersatu chief.

Meanwhile Roslee Abdul Hamid, the Kapar UMNO chief and a former member of the Port Klang Authority board, has been slated to fight this contest for the coalition government. PRM’s deputy president and ex-PKR youth chief Mohamad Ezam Mohd Noor is the final member of the ballot. PN hold


Parliament: P110 Klang (PH-DAP)

N45 Bandar Baru Klang



The royal capital and former administrative capital is the oldest surviving settlement in this part of Malaysia, a prize for whichever Sultanate controlled it thanks to the Klang River to which it guards access. It was this access that gave the river and settlement its name; “waterway” or “warehouse” are both offered as possible etymologies. It was also this access that triggered the Selangor Civil War as Raja Mahdi strove to regain control of the Klang Valley from Raja Abdullah, successor of Raja Mahdi’s father as chief of Klang.

The British intervention on that occasion established its headquarters in Klang and begun colonial rule from the town. Earlier entries have discussed the industry passing through Klang and its port, opened in 1901. Growth has been steady as the port and industry in Klang becomes ever more important to Malaysia’s oceanic commerce. Klang is currently set to be given city status in November, becoming the fourth city in Selangor and 20th nationwide.

Bandar Baru Klang seat currently takes in the part of the city proper which lies north of the Klang River. Situated on a former oil palm estate, the new “integrated township” for which the seat is named was designed in 1994 to be modern and well-connected with both Klang and Shah Alam. The latest in that endeavor is the upcoming Shah Alam LRT line which will run trains through the township on their way to the boondocks of southern Klang. Unsurprisingly these are mostly non-Malay neighborhoods, though the electorate has reportedly doubled since 2018 and it’s not clear what the exact numbers currently are.

Teng Chang Kim of DAP has reached the tail end of thirty years of public service in Klang. He entered the assembly in 1995, then survived 1999 as DAP’s only assemblyman and the 2004 massacre as one of two opposition assemblymen. He was the natural choice to become Selangor’s first non-Malay speaker in 2008 after Pakatan Rakyat took control of the state, when he also became a member of the state executive council where he has been a fixture for three terms. It is a long and illustrious career which he can be proud of.

Teng’s replacement has tough shoes to fill. Klang municipal councillor Dr. Quah Perng Fei (clinics in downtown Klang and Shah Alam) is very active on the ground, however, and in a more marginal constituency that would surely matter against Gerakan’s Tan Seng Huat who has absolutely no identifying details to be found anywhere. PH hold

N46 Pelabuhan Klang



Klang’s port only really began to be developed with the railway to Kuala Lumpur, built under Selangor Resident Frank Swettenham, as necessitated by tin mining interests needing a reliable form of transport. The quantities of tin that subsequently came down the railway necessitated larger ships and thus a proper deep port; so began the clearing of coastal mangrove swamps to build the new Port Swettenham, completed in 1901. And so trade took off.

Port Klang (as it was renamed in 1972) has only grown larger and more prominent since then, with cargo capacity expanding to 200 times what it was during wartime in 1940. Today that original port is named Southpoint and still serves as the center of industry, although recent administrations have poured money into Westport, a newer expansion on Pulau Indah to the west. Many of these projects are tied up with their sponsors in both past and present federal and state governments – think of Badawi’s Port Klang Free Zone.

This became a Malay-majority seat in the 2004 redelineation thanks to the machinations of then-Klang UMNO chief Zainal Deros, who convinced the neighboring Sementa and Sijangkang assemblymen to each transfer one of their Malay enclaves into the seat. Thus the additions of Pulau Indah and Kampung Pendamar respectively, protruding out southwest and southeast from the core of the seat in Port Klang, which have stayed here ever since. Zainal ran for the seat in 2004 and won; he was defeated in 2008 and died not long after. Zainal’s successor Badrul Hisham Abdullah left PKR in the middle of his term, as did Badrul’s own successor, menteri besar Khalid Ibrahim, after the Kajang debacle the following year. So it is something of a miracle that the political unrest of the past five years has passed this seat by.

Klang PKR chief Azmizam Zaman Huri, the incumbent in this seat, is a logistics operator by trade who worked with shipping agencies in the area before winning the seat in 2018. Despite rumors that UMNO was eyeing the seat through Zainal’s son Zainuri Zainal who has succeeded his father as Klang UMNO chief, Azmizam was retained as a candidate. Zainuri has been actively campaigning for the incumbent but he will nonetheless be prepping for a tough forecast. He faces Wan Hasrina Wan Hassan, the information chief for PAS’s women’s council who ran in Sementa in 2018, and PRM assistant secretary-general Syed Ahmad Putra Syed Isa. PH hold

N47 Pandamaran



Pandamaran is thought to be named for the boat patchers, or pendamar, who gave their settlement a name for the industry from the 19th century onwards. It certainly fits the primary orientation of southern Klang, gateway to Port Klang and rather industrialized in its own right. This is a tight grouping of homes radiating northeast along the Port Klang railroad from the Pandamaran new village, built here during the Emergency to house Chinese residents from as far as Kuala Selangor and Kuala Langat under the watchful eye of the British in Klang. Today their descendants ply what purports to be the best authentic bak kut teh in the city.

Rightly or wrongly the Klang area has developed a reputation for heightened gang activity. Pandamaran itself has been known for Chinese triads, and Kampung Raja Uda to its northwest for Malay gangs; there are also Indian gangs operating in other areas of the city and state. Alongside this are religious groups and charitable organizations trying to rebuild what the gangsters destroy in society; their membership also transcends race and creed.

There is a heavier concentration of Indians on this side of the river, as we will see shortly, but Pandamaran is still a predominantly Chinese seat that was never safe for the MCA. It gave DAP rabble-rouser Ronnie Liu his first election victory in 2008 and continued swinging further toward DAP for every one of its subsequent candidates. The latest one is Tony Leong Tuck Chee who resigned from the Klang council after winning the seat in 2018.

Leong is back for another swing as the incumbent. He is fairly popular in south Klang, which stems from his representation of the area as councillor. Then and now he has had a focus on maintaining basic amenities and facilities, in between fielding residential fallout from gang activities, that continues to be well remarked upon locally. But of course as with other urban DAP seats this hardly matters in his match against Bersatu’s Gunalan Balakrishnan and PRM information chief Tan Kang Yap. PH hold

[Joseph Cao]

Parliament: P111 Kota Raja (PH-Amanah)

N48 Sentosa



Much has been said about the Indian vote in recent elections. It is not the safe PH deposit that the Chinese vote, for example, is expected to be. It has produced a disproportionate amount of NGO leaders, activists, and socialists. It was particularly vocal in its discontent with the first PH administration. The Indian vote in all its forms – low-cost flat dwellers in outlying areas of Taman Sentosa, middle-class folk concerned with business and education in Taman Sentosa itself, rich people in the gated communities of Bandar Bukit Tinggi and Bandar Botanic to the west – is particularly concentrated in the Sentosa seat, the only seat in the country where Indians are the largest ethnic group.

This was an intentional move in the 2018 redelineation. The seat was formerly known as Kota Alam Shah after the royal palace within its borders, but Najib’s guiding principle of packing the non-Malay vote pushed the Indian % up to its present level by shifting the seat east away from the Istana. Since the seat had no overlap with its predecessor the EC fielded calls from voters to change its name.

The inadvertent beneficiary of that inflated non-Malay vote was PKR’s Gunarajah George. He has his party’s blessing to run again and will face three other candidates on the ballot. Gerakan has put forward Parameswaran Ganason, whose fighting name belies his chances in this seat. MUDA’s candidate is Thanusha Ramanieswaran who runs in educational NGO circles. PRM had originally planned to nominate its vice-president Manikavasigam Sundram, former PKR MP for Kapar, but she’s clearly had some problems with the nomination papers or something and the party has picked Jeichandran Wadivelu instead. PH hold

N49 Sungai Kandis



An oddly shaped seat straddling Shah Alam and Klang, this land is dominated by a jumbled collection of factories and smallholder plantations for pineapples and palm oil. Prior to the 2018 redelineation this was the much more compact Seri Andalas, named after a Klang neighborhood within the constituency which took its name in turn from one of Sumatra’s historic appellations. The seat now reaches south into straight rows of kampungs on the outskirts of Kota Kemuning and Klang where the upcoming Shah Alam rail line is planned to terminate. It’s retained most of its riverside territory, including a village named after the Klang tributary of Sungai Kandis which has lent its name to the current seat.

Zawawi Mughni of PKR won the seat in a by-election after the previous incumbent, Mat Shuhaimi Shafei, died of kidney failure weeks into his term. He was praised for his stature as principal of a local tahfiz school and community activist among other things, which dented early attempts by PAS to swing behind UMNO in the by-election. Though by any accounts it is tough running against a man who has a road (Lorong Haji Mughni) named after his father in his district. All very good candidate strengths that will be stress-tested very soon, as the PAS candidate for parliament carried this seat even while losing in a landslide to Amanah president Mat Sabu last year; the party was particularly strong in Zawawi’s home turf.

Zawawi, having survived a round of speculation about dropped incumbents, is in pole position for his first proper poll. Facing off with him is Bersatu’s Wan Dzahanurin Ahmad, the Selangor Bersatu assistant treasurer and its Kota Raja division chief. MUDA’s entrant is its Selangor treasurer and Kuala Selangor chief Afriena Shaqira Sariff, a mechanical engineer by study. PN gain from PH

N50 Kota Kemuning



Kota Kemuning is the baby of a comparatively late entrant to the property scene. Gamuda Land’s first venture into the business came in 1995 with the construction of this township, joining UEP Sime Darby’s Putra Heights on the other side of the Klang River. Like many recently developed townships it has a bad infestation of roundabouts. Here too is Taman Sri Muda, where the streets names are themed around values to be instilled in young children. This was the original namesake for the seat before the 2018 redelineation which cut away Malay villages on the outskirts of Kota Kemuning (they are now part of Sungai Kandis). It’s also, arguably, a premier example of bad urban town planning thanks to its location inside a bend of the Klang River and consequent susceptibility to bad floods, which seem to happen annually here.

The 2018 redelineation triggered a game of musical chairs in the Klang area. DAP’s Ganabatirau Veraman was shuffled here from his incumbent Kota Alam Shah (renamed Sentosa) after PKR’s Mat Shuhaimi Shafei was sent to Sungai Kandis (formerly Seri Andalas) to replace Xavier Jeyakumar who moved up to Parliament to replace the Kuala Langat MP Abdullah Sani Abdul Hamid who was sent to Kapar. In his own game of parliamentary musical chairs Gana was (still, inexplicably) nominated to replace Charles Santiago in the Klang parliamentary contest last year. Media coverage at the time was somewhat unfair to Gana, who was very vocal about the causes of flooding in Taman Sri Muda and does have groundwork of his own across the constituency, and at any rate he believes his current MP duties are enough to handle at present. So he has telegraphed his intention not to run again.

There was some initial buzz that Ganabatirau’s brother Papparaidu, a Shah Alam councillor, would contest here, but he has ultimately been sent to Banting where we will meet him later on. Instead DAP has brought in solicitor Preakas Sampunathan who is heavily involved with public advocacy in the Klang area. Another safe seat, another one with not much to say aside from a hat tip to the various other long shots: hapless Gerakan central committee member Jimmy Chew Jyh Gang, last seen losing in a landslide in Puchong off east, and PRM’s Gunasekaran Kuppan, ex-Selangor PKR deputy head of information (are you sensing a theme with current or former PRM candidates?). PH hold


Parliament: P112 Kuala Langat (PN-PAS)

N51 Sijangkang



Carey Island, the western anchor of this seat, entered historical records as an Orang Asli settlement which the powers-that-be (the English) appropriated for plantations (rubber). It remains an Orang Asli settlement which the powers-that-be (Sime Darby) appropriated for plantations (palm oil). Despite the “island” name it is linked with communities to its east, thanks to the shallowness of Sungai Langat at this point; just west of Jenjarom the river divides into two streams flowing either side of Carey Island toward the Straits of Malacca. It thus forms a natural bay.

Next door is Teluk Panglima Garang, the quietest town in Selangor, originally a piece of land coveted by traders from Acheh looking to consolidate their hold over the river mouth. In doing so they clashed with its native inhabitants who fled east to Dengkil. On the journey east the Orang Asli spread the word of “fierce commanders in the bay” from which the town takes its name.

After all this, the satellite community of Sijangkang is a distinctly less interesting village named for a locally grown rubber tree; it does however accurately reflect the agricultural orientation of the rest of the seat. The Najib-run Election Commission’s final big redraw in Selangor was to pull rural palm oil lands and the Malay township of Bandar Saujana Putra out of the Teluk Datuk state seat, then held by DAP, and transfer them here in the hopes of reclaiming a PAS seat that Selangor PAS commissioner Ahmad Yunus Hairi won in 2008.

Ahmad Yunus correctly forecast at the time that the EC’s move would backfire on BN. He was his party’s lone survivor of 2018 amidst the PH wave here and the surprise winner of the Kuala Langat parliamentary seat last year amidst the PN wave here, winning both seats on the strength of that transferred Malay vote and the rapport he has built up in the rural areas. At the same time it is extremely easy to see the influence of Pulau Carey’s industry as he lost the entire island to PH and BN. As the default commander of his party’s efforts in the state, Ahmad Yunus now faces Teluk Panglima Garang UMNO Youth chief Mohd Al-Hafizi Abu Bakar, who is distinctly outmatched. PN hold

N52 Banting



Banting and Jenjarom have been the beating hearts of of Kuala Langat district, Banting for the commerce and administration and Jenjarom for the agriculture. They are named for these in turn – Banting after the local buffalo, Jenjarom after the needlelike flowers of the native ixora. Early Chinese settlers who joined the Orang Asli here were mostly Hokkien. The Malay settlers here eventually produced the five badminton powerhouses of the Sidek brothers, who won Malaysia the Thomas Cup and several Olympic medals. Currently the seat takes in the immediate surroundings of these two towns, but in the seat’s previous incarnation as Teluk Datuk (after a village outside Banting) it stretched north and east almost as far as Puchong.

DAP’s Philip Tan Choon Swee flipped that mixed seat by 638 votes in 2008, the second-narrowest held by the party at the time after Sekinchan. Following a falling-out with the local DAP after it dropped him in 2013 he joined PRM in 2018 as its Selangor information chief, in which position he still serves. His successor Loh Chee Heng was in turn sacked by DAP in 2016 for misuse of constituency funds. In a bid for a safer pair of hands DAP state organizing secretary Lau Weng San took the helm here in 2018, and was the beneficiary of the redelineation which also transferred Chinese villages in from Sijangkang; they blew Lau’s margin out even further than in his previous urban constituency of Kampung Tunku, cementing the renamed Banting as a pure urban seat.

Lau is not recontesting the seat, and as part of a deal cut with central leadership will be nominated to the speaker’s post if PH retains control of the assembly. His assistant Papparaidu Veraman, a Shah Alam councillor who founded a Malaysian Indian-focused NGO, is coming in instead. Papparaidu faces Gerakan’s Saravanan Mutto Krishnan who is seemingly running to become the assemblyman for YouTube. Completing the ballot is independent Ang Wei Yang, who at 23 ties with MUDA’s Melanie Ting for youngest candidate (the media have all run with Melanie as being the youngest candidate in Selangor, but it could theoretically be either of them – they don’t make candidates’ birthdays public and neither of them have this information on their social media so who really knows). PH hold

N53 Morib



The “bay” into which Sungai Langat flows is technically located to the north, but one of them runs down the western border of this seat and provides a clear delineation in the Selangor coastline. This is a significantly less industrialized stretch of coast than the one to its north. Further down lies the town of Morib and its beach, a small but accessible weekend destination, where the Allied effort landed in September 1945 to retake Japanese-occupied Malaya. As a side note one of the soldiers in that operation was future Pakistani dictator Muhammad Zia ul-had.

The seat stretches up to the edges of Jenjarom and actually into Banting town, an indication of the ties this rural stretch of coastline still retains to the main centers of activity in Kuala Langat district. It takes in Jugra, standing near a hill that also served as a navigational guide for sailors in the Malacca straits; as such it was the royal town and administrative hub of Selangor during the early colonial period, boasting the first police station in Selangor and Sultan Abdul Samad’s Istana Jugra, among other things. The royal seat shifted back to Klang after the 1930s and the Jugra area receded into obscurity.

All things considered the seat has seen better days. It was PAS-held for two terms before its 2013 winner Hasnul Baharuddin defected to Amanah; he won the 2018 election on his new label with PAS moving into a strong third place. Between then and now two developments have occurred. Ahmad Yunus Hairi won the seat quite convincingly as he came first in the race for Kuala Langat. And earlier this year the local Amanah branch’s rumblings of discontent with Hasnul burst into public view as it demanded another candidate stand in his place. But what Anwar says, goes, and the deputy speaker has been slated to stand again.

He has a straight fight with Rosnizan Ahmad of Bersatu, the party’s Kuala Langat chief. There were rumors that Azmin might stand here as PN deemed it a “safe” seat for him; that is not an inaccurate assessment and reflective of what one party candidly thinks of its chances, which is always valuable information to have. PN gain from PH


Parliament: P113 Sepang (PH-Amanah)

N54 Tanjong Sepat



The fourth corner of Selangor, like the state’s other extremities, has been blessed with more opportunities for natural tourism than the overbuilt central part of the state. Various homestay initiatives have been running for a few decades in Tanjung Sepat village, trying to lure visitors further down the road from Morib to their quiet beaches and starry night skies. Pantai Cunang is one such excellent beach, maintained by an outpost of the Mah Meri Orang Asli living in the nearby Kampung Koi. Former UMNO assemblyman Karim Mansor was reportedly on excellent terms with the tribe and supported their efforts prior to leaving office in 2013.

Tanjung Sepat has been a fishing village for generations (from which it derives its name, “sepat” being one of the fish caught here in abundance). As with other coastal villages, seafood restaurants dot the landscape; they especially cluster around the Lovers’ Bridge, a popular attraction for sunset viewers. Inland, the dragonfruit farms for which the area is also renowned stretch away towards Sepang alongside coconut and oil palm estates.

Incumbent Borhan Aman Shah of PKR, Amirudin’s political secretary and the deputy chief of Selangor PH, is defending this seat after picking it up in 2018; the PAS incumbent placed a distant third on that occasion as Karim Mansor came second for UMNO. He faces PAS’s Sepang chief Sabirin Marsono, who notched a distant third place as his party’s 2018 candidate in Sepang. Not a particularly good performance, but who knows what difference nine months can make? PN gain from PH

N55 Dengkil



Cyberjaya township was planned and developed in the Mahathir era to be a high-tech complement to Putrajaya next door. It is fair to say that has not come to pass. The area is full of students and administrative staff, both overwhelmingly Malay, but they all vanish into the wide-spaced greenery of the “sustainable smart city” as it dubs itself. Multiply the wide spaces by ten for the rest of the seat, which encircles Putrajaya and covers the northern half of Sepang district. Residents are understandably well acquainted with the vagaries of bureaucracy.

Further south is the Dengkil area, which depending on who you ask is either named after a local durian, the shallow bed of Sungai Langat, or a type of plant growing on the river’s banks. There were tin mines and rubber estates here and there was a new village, both put paid to by a 1969 fire that destroyed most of the village and mining infrastructure. After that many Chinese families chose to settle in Klang instead. A golf resort in the area still plays unwilling host to the Temuan people who were evicted from the UKM site in Bangi; they refused to move a second time when the state government sold off the land it promised them and offered to move them onto land already occupied by other groups of Orang Asli. Those still living on the resort’s lands have no formal access to water and electricity.

Incumbent Adhif Syan Abdullah was yet another Bersatu candidate who broke the seat away from its true-blue voting pattern in 2018, coming pretty far ahead of both the UMNO incumbent (who defeated Borhan Aman Shah in 2013) and the PAS candidate. Early in 2020 he was detained in a drug bust at a Kuala Lumpur house party but denied having taken any illicit drugs, claiming he was at the wrong place at the wrong time. Shortly afterwards he tested positive – for COVID-19, not drugs. Given all this it is not very hard to discern the political angle in Adhif being dropped as a candidate, although again he swears up and down that he needs to take care of his mother and child.

As a replacement Bersatu is fielding former Domestic Trade and Consumer Affairs Ministry secretary-general Jamil Salleh who served in that position for 35 years before his retirement under the PH federal administration, at which point he became a member of the party. His principal challenger Noorazli Said, UMNO’s Sepang chief, claims local boy status (he was born in Tanjung Sepat). Xiamen University Malaysia mathematics professor Darren Ong Chung Lee, a Dengkil resident of seven years, contests for PSM. Lawyer Mohd Daud Leong Abdullah ran for the Sepang parliamentary seat in GE15 as an independent but is contesting this time under his own party, Parti Utama Rakyat (PUR). PN hold

N56 Sungai Pelek



One of the proposed etymologies behind the name of Sungai Pelek village is “unusual river,” because of the formation of a temporary river from the spillage of the nearby Sungai Sepang whenever it overflows. Very transient, as befits a seat housing Kuala Lumpur International Airport and various bedroom communities as well as other villages stretching down the N9 state border to the coast. Sepang is one of these, with a racing circuit that drew hundreds of thousands in its heyday. Sungai Pelek itself has a new village which has outstripped the original Malay village within its borders, and notably was the childhood home of former Health Director-General Noor Hisham Abdullah, face of Malaysia’s COVID-19 response. He retired earlier this year to critical acclaim.

“Unusual” is maybe too timid a description of Ronnie Liu Tian Khiew, incumbent since 2018, who in his 41 years of DAP affiliation has been one of its premier controversy magnets. Rest assured there is not enough space here to go into all of them. He left the party the day after the assembly dissolved, citing persistent disagreements with party leadership, having held the seat for DAP after his predecessor flipped it narrowly in 2013. This is the only Malay-majority seat DAP is contesting this time and in 2018 Ronnie actually got a smaller percentage of the vote than Edry Faizal did in a seat with a 10% higher share of the Malay vote. With this in mind it has been blitzed especially hard by DAP leaders throughout the two-week campaign.

Ronnie’s replacement as DAP candidate, Sepang municipal councillor Lwi Kian Keong, is  nowhere near as fiery based on what we’ve seen so far, although he was a member of DAP Socialist Youth so you never know. He does bring local leadership which the DAP grassroots seem to be eager for after one term of Ronnie. Bersatu is pushing its Sepang chief Suhaimi Mohd Ghazali, who was previously elected as an UMNO assemblyman here in 2004. Our final candidate is independent businessman Nageswaran Ravi, who ran in Sepang under the PRM banner last year and came dead last with 165 votes. PH hold

[Joseph Cao]

Final tally:

PH 33
DAP 15
PKR 14
Amanah 4

PN 23
Bersatu 12
PAS 11

I was going to say to jaichind, having DAP win 16 seats in the state is pretty bullish on them when they're only contesting 15 seats. Not that a single miscalculation matters much.

[Oryxslayer]

As the election wraps up it seems PN is focusing on Selangor vs Negeri Sembilan.  On paper, Negeri Sembilan should be an easier pickup for PN but they are seeing it differently. Either PN sees some real chance in Selangor or their ground report has told them that Negeri Sembilan cannot be won or both.

It seems to be a case of the second:

https://twitter.com/AsiaElects/status/1690078645111398400?t=0V8QMGriZG6MLXrnFVQM...

https://twitter.com/AsiaElects/status/1690080071170605056?t=mlI-cetm2R_BOEfzYK2U...

https://twitter.com/AsiaElects/status/1690023868751081472?t=e6ZQU3I6opvA16f6bztH...

https://twitter.com/AsiaElects/status/1690021711872159744?t=x9iRX6PBrtp1d88Y_gwi...

The overall vote may be less rigid for PH in Negeri, but it seems more persuadeable Malays prefer them there than in Selangor.  

[jaichind]

As the election wraps up it seems PN is focusing on Selangor vs Negeri Sembilan.  On paper, Negeri Sembilan should be an easier pickup for PN but they are seeing it differently. Either PN sees some real chance in Selangor or their ground report has told them that Negeri Sembilan cannot be won or both.

It seems to be a case of the second:
 

The argument for Negeri Sembilan being out of reach for PN is that UMNO can still hold the significant FELDA (Federal Land Development Authority) vote there.  FELDA are farm colonies that were created back in the 1960s and 1970s with a great level of government subsidies for the purposes of crop diversification.  These rural Malays living there should in theory be ripe to shift to PN but for historical reasons could still stay loyal to UMNO this election and make the high chance of  PN winning Negeri Sembilan a mirage.

[jaichind]

Link to results that I can find

https://prn.luminews.my/
https://www.myundi.com.my/prn2023
https://pru.astroawani.com/

[jaichind]

Emir research projections

[jaichind]

Final tally:

PH 33
DAP 15
PKR 14
Amanah 4

PN 23
Bersatu 12
PAS 11

I was going to say to jaichind, having DAP win 16 seats in the state is pretty bullish on them when they're only contesting 15 seats. Not that a single miscalculation matters much.

There were a few seats where I made a mistake on who is running for PH-BN and who is running for PN.  Just comparing my guess to yours made me find those 3-4 mistakes.

So my back-of-the-envelope guess for Selangor after fixing these errors are

DAP       15
PKR       16
AMANAH  4
UMNO      1
PPBM     10
PAS       10

My  back-of-the-envelope guess differs from you on
18th (I have PKR instead of your PPBM), 24th (I have UMNO instead of your PAS), and 49th (I have PKR instead of your PPBM)