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

[Joseph Cao]

In that vein, there are parliamentary and Johor state assembly by-elections coming up on Saturday to fill, respectively, the parliamentary seat of Pulai and state assembly seat of Simpang Jeram vacated by the death of domestic trade and cost of living minister Salahuddin Ayub. I happened to find some good primary sources for a comprehensive preview of the seats, so please enjoy the fruits of my madness. It might not last.

The maps still have the same key: red PH, blue BN, green PN.


P161 Pulai

“Cita-cita saya adalah kalau boleh rahmah ini jadi suatu value, mungkin sampai bila-bila setiap peniaga ataupun antara kita yang membuka perniagaan, yang untung ataupun tidak untung, tapi ada portion daripada perniagaan kita itu kita dah niat untuk membantu orang yang susah.”
(“My ambition is that this grace can become a value, perhaps to the point when any time each trader or any of us who opens a business, profitable or not, will set aside a portion of our business with the intent to help people in need.”)

—Salahuddin Ayub, debating the Payung Rahmah initiative in Parliament

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Pulai is an irregular slice of the western Johor Bahru area. Beginning at the Istana Besar near the city center, the seat meanders west along the Johor Strait past Danga Bay at the mouth of the Skudai estuary, with its massive tower blocks built on reclaimed land. This is similar in scope to the light industry playground of Tampoi slightly upriver which also houses Hospital Permai and its psychiatric wards; the hospital’s most famous resident is local superhero Keluang Man. On the other bank of the Skudai river are the newer neighborhoods of Taman Perling and Bukit Indah, both with fairly good commercial and recreational opportunities with transport links as far as Singapore via the Tuas Link further south past Iskandar Puteri.

From there the Pulai seat runs north and east towards Kempas as far as the Kempas Baru railway station (last stop before the KTM’s Johor Bahru terminus) which sits on the seat’s northern boundary. The Kempas main road became part of the North-South Expressway. This suburb has spread to the other side of the highway where two Boeing 747s are parked in a field – their owners plan to turn them into hotel space – and further down the highway is Malaysia’s first Starbucks Coffee drive-through, though unfortunately both these attractions are located outside the seat. As of 2022 the whole constituency is 44.5% Malay, 40.2% Chinese, 12.2% Indian, and 3.1% other ethnicities.

You may notice that Pulai town itself hasn’t been mentioned. It lies far outside the seat, near the headwaters of the Pulai river rising at Gunung Pulai, an area covered with the pulai trees after which all these places are named; these trees are soft-wooded, commonly growing at the edges of forests, and their leaves are traditionally used to treat fevers. The Pulai constituency did originally take in this area as we’ll see later, but today the area lies within the Iskandar Puteri constituency.

(One other connection between the Pulai seat and Gunung Pulai is the former Johore Wooden Railway planned to link the two, conceived by then-Maharaja Abu Bakar in 1869 but never fully completed – it may be of interest to his great-great-grandson, Johor Sultan Ibrahim Ismail, who learned about trains in order to drive the last KTM train out of Tanjong Pagar railway station in 2011 before KTM’s Singapore terminus was relocated to Woodlands.)

Like the rest of the state, Pulai was true-blue BN for a very long time. The coalition’s vote share in Johor has consistently been around 10% higher than at the national level, in part because of its monopolisation of the Malay vote to an even greater degree than elsewhere. We will get to two reasons for this. The first is the symbolism Johor holds for UMNO; the party was founded at the Istana Besar with a Johorean, Onn Jaafar, elected its first president – he had led the Peninsular Malay Movement of Johor and was then serving as a district officer in the state government, and would go on to serve as the first menteri besar of Johor. Two other feeder parties for UMNO at its founding were also Johorean-run: the Singapore Malay Union led by local prosecutor Sardon Jubir (future MP for Pontian Utara, future health minister etc.) and the Johor Malay Union founded by state commissioner (and brother-in-law of Onn Jaafar) Abdul Rahman Yassin, later the first speaker of the Dewan Negara.

Abdul Rahman Yassin’s family are probably more famous in their own right. His second son Ismail Abdul Rahman (died fifty years and about a month ago at the time of writing) was deputy prime minister under Abdul Razak, successfully convinced his boss to reopen Parliament after its suspension following May 13, and is generally considered the best politician who never became prime minister. The eldest son Suleiman Abdul Rahman was also in politics from the beginning; in time he would become a minister but started off in the Federal Legislative Council, being elected in 1955 to the constituency of Johore Bahru which at the time stretched far enough west to take in Sungai Pulai and Gunung Pulai.

Johore Bahru was split east-west ahead of the first elections to the new Malaysian Parliament in 1959. The new Johore Bahru Timor elected Mohamad Noah Omar, who then became the first Speaker of the Dewan Rakyat; the new Johore Bahru Barat went to Ahmad Mohamed Shah, who became chairman of the influential Public Accounts Committee. Ahmad was succeeded in 1964 in turn by Rahmat Daud, at the time the first speaker of the Johor state assembly. He is recorded in Hansard as referring to then-Philippine president Ferdinand Marcos as “corrupt-minded” during a debate in 1968.

Rahmat Daud did not return for the next election. Another new MP was elected in 1969 over a consolidated opposition vote behind DAP up-and-comer Daeng Ibrahim Othman, who would go on to lead a Malay DAP charge in Perak for the 1974 elections, but unlike all his predecessors this new MP would go on to hold the seat for thirty years and seven general elections. Mohamed Rahmat (no relation to his predecessor) climbed the greasy pole quickly. In his first term he was made political secretary to then-Education minister Hussein Onn and was made a minister when the latter ascended to the PMship.

Mohamed Rahmat became known as “Mr. Propaganda” for his two highly effective stints as Minister of Information in the Hussein Onn and Mahathir cabinets. He was most famously responsible for the Semarak program, an abbreviation for Setia Bersama Rakyat (“Loyal to the People”) that ran in 1988 at the height of internal UMNO struggles, which was designed to foster patriotism and loyalty to the country’s government – and by extension UMNO itself. It came with its own song, Setia, written with RTM music director Ahmad Dassilah Mohd Yusoff and songwriter Habsah Hassan. Mohamed Rahmat was made UMNO secretary-general the same year and got involved in reregistering members to UMNO Baru, both jobs tied to his unflinching support of Mahathir throughout this period. Mahathir returned the favor and over the years made several visits to his constituency, renamed Pulai in 1974 after the mountain, river, and town still lying within its boundaries, though some of its western hinterlands were lost in 1984.

Things changed after the 1994 redelineation. One of the two extra parliamentary seats awarded to Johor that year was extracted from the less urban west of Pulai containing its namesakes, becoming the new MCA constituency of Gelang Patah. And the old propaganda magic lost its luster as the Anwar Ibrahim saga unfolded. Early in May 1999 Mohamed Rahmat infamously accused Anwar’s wife and PKR leader Wan Azizah of being unfit for leading the country (on account of her being “Chinese” and without a “Malay soul”), then doubled down on it. Within a fortnight he resigned as minister; within another fortnight Mahathir performed a cabinet reshuffle which left him out in the cold completely. Mohamed Rahmat had served as information minister for a total of sixteen years.

Thus did the now-fully urban Pulai seat open up for the 1999 election. Mohamed Rahmat continued to lead Pulai UMNO for a while and his deputy at the time was Abdul Kadir Annuar, who had been assemblyman for both state seats under Pulai. There he had been managing Islamic religious affairs on the state executive council with excellent credentials from his earlier stint as Sultan Ibrahim Iskandar’s religious teacher. Abdul Kadir was asked to make the jump to Parliament to replace his boss, and did so. He did not distinguish himself there; rumors were that he was warming the seat, perhaps for Mohamed Rahmat’s son Nur Jazlan Mohamed, at the time a corporate officer for Proton, who was widely speculated to be groomed for one or both of the two men’s positions.

Nur Jazlan got both: he took over his father’s position as Pulai UMNO chief shortly before BN slated him to stand in the parliamentary seat in 2004. Things were quiet for his first term but following the unprecedented opposition gains in 2008 he launched a quixotic and short-lived campaign for the UMNO deputy presidency, for which Mahathir branded him a joker, although the press ate up his “moderate UMNO” image. Being half-Chinese (from his mother) and somewhat critical of UMNO’s decisions in the early days of the Najib administration helped burnish this image, and was no hindrance in a seat that by now stood at 47% Malay, 41% Chinese, and 12% Indian and other ethnicities.

Pakatan Rakyat coordinated an assault on Johor for the 2013 general election. DAP supremo Lim Kit Siang contested in the Chinese-majority Gelang Patah, and won; Johor PKR president Chua Jui Meng (ex-MCA – we will come to him later) went up against the MIC president S. Subramaniam in the northwestern seat of Segamat, and lost. For its part PAS sent its vice-president and incumbent Kubang Kerian MP Salahuddin Ayub down to Pulai. Salahuddin, himself half-Chinese, had been born and raised in nearby Pontian, though he had made his career in Kelantan as Nik Aziz Nik Mat’s protege, being one of the leaders who effectively ran the state party during Nik Aziz’s illness in 2004. Nur Jazlan did his best to play up local issues and tar his opponent with the hudud controversy that had stuck to other PAS candidates, but his margin was nonetheless slashed from 20,449 in 2008 to 3,226 in 2013. Salahuddin vowed to stay in Pulai and “fight with you until the demise of BN”.

True to his word Salahuddin returned to Pulai in the following election, having left PAS and helped Mohamad Sabu establish the Parti Amanah Negara in 2015. Nur Jazlan became a deputy minister that same year. But his time as an MP would end like his father’s did, by shooting off his mouth: in the months before the 2018 election he repeatedly insisted that overseas voters did not matter, would not affect any results, and should not vote, even getting into a fight with Cathay Pacific on Twitter after the airline waived rebooking fares for returning voters from Hong Kong. Salahuddin defeated him resoundingly by 28,924 votes. One or two of the votes may have come from overseas.

Salahuddin served as agriculture and agro-based industries minister until the fall of the PH government in early 2020 and showed no reluctance for running again in GE15. After explicitly denying that he would do so, Nur Jazlan contested Pulai once more. There was some little controversy with the PN selection: Deepak Jaikishan, better known as the carpet trader who hates Najib’s guts, was initially slated to run under the Bersatu ticket but he fell out with the party and fled to Klang to run as an independent; PN replaced him with Tebrau Gerakan chief Loh Kah Yong.

Anwar appointed Salahuddin to his cabinet as minister for domestic trade and cost of living. Post-pandemic there was a need for immediate action tackling the cost of living issue while more long-term economic reforms were set in motion, and Salahuddin rose to the occasion with Payung Rahmah, an umbrella of initiatives with the basic aim of making everyday essentials accessible to those in poverty. The face of this programme was the Menu Rahmah: affordable meals priced at 5 ringgit (just over $1). Global fast-food chains and street vendors alike were encouraged to promote their own versions without government aid. Many did so.

As the first concrete government action directly and visibly benefiting the public this made Salahuddin something of a hero, and it is no surprise that when he died suddenly on July 23 after undergoing surgery for a brain hemorrhage, the outpouring of grief was wide. He is the first federal minister to die in office in nearly fifty years, after the 1977 demise of then-agriculture minister Ali Ahmad – at the time MP for the village where Salahuddin had been born and where he is now laid to rest.

“Rahmah” means mercy or grace when translated into English. In these times of hardship alleviated somewhat by Salahuddin’s initiative, many in politics will hope it extends to the voters’ consideration of his successor in Pulai. Amanah have selected their stalwart Suhaizan Kayat, who had been active in Johor PAS early on, joined Amanah alongside Salahuddin, and served as Johor state assembly speaker from 2018 to 2022 (including post-Sheraton Move, a rare case of a speaker from the opposition being retained) and most recently as political secretary in Salahuddin’s ministry. He has run in every election from 2004 onward in seats up and down the state, including twice in the Pulai state seat of Kempas, losing all of them, but this is by far the safest berth he’s been offered.

Gerakan have not returned, despite a very crass (since-deleted) tweet from their president Dominic Lau declaring his interest in running less than 24 hours after Salahuddin’s death. Instead PN have selected Pulai Bersatu deputy chief Zulkifli Jaafar, a businessman with directorships in at least six different companies. There is also an independent candidate in the form of Kuala Lumpur Consumer Safety Association president Samsudin Mohamad Fauzi, who previously contested and lost in Putrajaya last year. At last report he claimed he had been commuting to Pulai for three weeks to collect data from its residents.

With due respect to Samsudin therefore, all the data available suggests that Amanah will hold this – and this is in contrast to Muhyiddin and other PN bigwigs who, desperate to deny the government a two-thirds majority, have “issued a fatwa” against voting for Suhaizan and claimed supporting him is “haram” and so on. As it happens Suhaizan himself says his main worry is about getting a convincing majority. So the main test for PH+BN lies elsewhere, to the north, in Suhaizan’s birthplace of Muar…

PH hold

[Joseph Cao]

N13 Simpang Jeram

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The second reason for BN’s historic grip on the Malay vote in Johor dates back to precolonial times, with the Johor Sultanate’s active role in administering the state. In 1895 Sultan Abu Bakar drafted a Constitution which placed the Sultanate at the head of Islam in the state with wide latitude to spread its traditionalist and monarchist flavour of Islam. The British were able to chip away at the Sultanate’s authority over more prosaic matters of governing but they left its religious authority alone, and the rubber boom of the early 20th century brought money into royal coffers that was plowed into the largest religious education network in the Malay states of the period, dwarfing even those of Kelantan and Terengganu. Those states came to be dominated by PAS’s own religious schools in time to come, but Johor PAS was never able to establish its schools on the Sultanate’s turf, boxing it out of the political conversation in the state. Hence UMNO and BN’s unquestioned dominance of the Malay vote, and a Johorean Malay-Muslim society that is less amenable to PAS than almost anywhere else on the peninsula.

Johor was mapped completely for the first time during Abu Bakar’s reign. The man responsible for this feat was Datuk Bentara Luar Muhamad Salleh Perang, who in the process opened up the northern reaches of Johor for development. He was instrumental in the early history of northwestern Muar District, exploring the Muar river upstream from its eponymous town. One tributary, where his men opened a settlement, was named Sungai Abong after the nipa palm sugar (gula apong) they harvested there, and the rapids of the surrounding streams gave the area its subsequent name of Simpang Jeram.

Muar was granted the sobriquet of Bandar Maharani at its founding in 1884, in honour of the Sultan’s wife, Maharani Fatima Abdullah. A road had been built connecting Muar and a Javanese village to its east (Kampung Jawa) as early as 1869, but Muhamad Salleh upgraded it in 1890 so that it remained the longest and straightest road in the state for a long time to come; he named it Jalan Bakri in honor of the Sultan’s birthday. The town that later rose around the village is thus known as Bakri today. The current Simpang Jeram seat (53.42% Malay, 43.32% Chinese, 2.75% Indian, 0.51% other ethnicities) takes in the fringes of Muar and Bakri towns and the housing spilling between them along Jalan Bakri, completed by an assortment of villages and plantations. The self-proclaimed “furniture hub” of Muar Furniture Park lies outside the seat’s boundaries but the industry’s retailers have also set up shop all along Jalan Bakri.

At the election of 1955 Muar District was split between two seats: Muar Selatan, where the present-day Simpang Jeram lies, and Muar Utara. For the 1959 Malayan general election each of these two constituencies were split again. Muar Utara was split along the Muar River and its eastern half was named Muar Dalam; the western portion of Muar Selatan, covering the coastline around the mouth of the Muar River, was made a constituency of its own. Despite the name, the new Muar Pantai also stretched inland to take in Bakri and its environs, and the state seat covering this area was named Parit Bakar.

Its first assemblyman was UMNO’s Kosai Salleh, a Muar local who had been the first Malay to study forestry at Oxford. On his return in 1940 he was appointed forestry officer for Johor, Melaka, and Negeri Sembilan where he served uninterrupted apart from the small matter of the Japanese occupation. After winning Parit Bakar in 1959 he became a member of the inaugural Johor Executive Council with responsibilities for agriculture and development; during his ten years in the assembly he oversaw the expansion of farmland and building of roads and ditches in his seat. Kosai died in 1968, and a road connecting Parit Bakar to Bakri is named Jalan Dato’ Haji Kosai in his memory.

Kosai was survived by his wife and nine children. His widow entered politics the following year by contesting Parit Jawa, to the south; their daughter Robia would be elected to represent the same area in 1999. In the meantime Parit Bakar was taken over by Aziz Ishak, vacating the Muar Dalam parliamentary seat he had held since its creation in 1959. Aziz had been Johor UMNO’s communications director and political secretary to fellow Johorean Ismail Abdul Rahman, and was also made secretary to Johor menteri besar Othman Saat in 1967. After his election to the Johor assembly Othman also appointed Aziz to head the state’s agricultural affairs committee.

On April 30, 1974, Aziz was found drowned in the Muar River. This time anonymous UMNO man Mohamed Zin Maidin was appointed to the seat and almost immediately pressed into the next general election in September. A redelineation was required by law that year; it was carried out hastily and very improperly in Johor, being rushed through Parliament a month before the election, with boundary changes not publicly detailed at the polling district level as they were in all other states. Seats all over the country were redrawn in the process of creating as many Malay-advantage constituencies as possible. Segamat District to the north of Muar previously had an east-west division of seats, both majority non-Malay: Indians in Segamat Utara and Chinese in and around Labis town in Segamat Selatan. As the Election Commission rotated their orientation to become north-south in 1974 these two ethnic groups were packed together into the new Segamat seat, expanding southward to make room for the newly Malay-majority Labis to its north.

Muar District’s constituencies contracted south in turn to make room for Segamat. Muar Selatan, renamed Semerah, was pushed out of the district altogether, and the new Muar parliamentary constituency combined its remnants with the part of the old Muar Pantai containing Muar and Bakri towns. The Parit Bakar state seat was transferred with them, contracting slightly and stealing the name Bandar Maharani from a disappearing seat to its west.

Mohamed Zin Maidin, more suited to the rural reaches of the seat, took the seat of Parit Jawa as it shifted north into his former seat. Instead the newly renamed Bandar Maharani got MCA assemblyman and prominent rubber baron Chua Song Lim, who came with the seat’s new name from its disappearing neighbor to the west. Chua had been elected to the Johor state Settlement Council (predecessor to the state assembly) in 1955 for the Tangkak seat and was seamlessly reelected to its successor Bandar Maharani in 1959; in 1974 he crossed the Muar River and won the new Bandar Maharani without trouble. At the time he was MCA vice-president and had been confronted by Lim Kit Siang a few years earlier over his stance on recognising university degrees from Singapore.

Chua only served one more term, as it turned out. In 1978 the Muar UMNO secretary Musa Ismail took over Bandar Maharani after a few seat swaps between UMNO and MCA triggered by Gerakan’s entry into the state coalition. Apart from a brief mention of his brother-in-law leading the Muar miners’ association there isn’t much to be found about him in the records, and he was returned as assemblyman in 1982 without fuss.

The redelineation of 1984 split off half of the Muar parliamentary seat. The inland, substantially more Chinese part centred around Bakri and northern Muar towns became the constituency of Bakri, which was allocated to and won by the MCA’s Chua Jui Meng in 1986. It inherited two state seats: the more urban Maharani in the west, and the more rural Bukit Naning in the east which UMNO won that election and holds to this day (with an interruption in 2018). Neither seat was amenable to Musa Ismail, who continued on in the rump Parit Bakar left behind in Muar.

Maharani fell to the DAP that election with the candidacy of its Johor chairman Song Sing Kwee, who managed to hold Chua Jui Meng to a small majority in Bakri at the same time. Song was detained in Mahathir’s Operation Lalang the following year and had to give up his seat at the next election. The burgeoning alliance between the DAP and the Chinese school committees’ association Dong Zong marked a turning point in grassroots mobilisation for the party during this period: in 1990 they made a concerted effort to flip Bakri with the candidacy of Dong Zong executive secretary Lee Ban Chen. In the event Chua widened his majority, but Muar Chung Hwa High School board member John Lim Wan Show successfully held Maharani for the DAP.

The seat returned to form in 1995 with the victory of MCA’s Tay Khim Seng, a lawyer well-connected with local Chinese organizations, taking advantage of Lim’s retirement and fissures between the DAP and Dong Zong that hobbled their efforts to defend the seat. The 1994 redelineation had largely passed northern Johor by and its effect on this result, if any, was probably not large. Tay did not recontest in 1999, choosing to focus on his private career; he currently serves on the board of furniture giant Poh Huat Resources Holdings and is senior partner at the Muar branch of law firm J. A. Nathan & Co.

“New face” Lau Yew Wee held Maharani for MCA that year, defeating the newly minted Johor DAP chairman Pang Hok Liong, who inherited a state party in shambles after Song resigned as chair and took much of DAP’s branch machinery with him. Pang, currently two-term MP for Labis, had better elections ahead of him. But in the meantime there was much recrimination to go around for the DAP’s dismal performance in 1999.

A fresh redelineation in 2003 granted an extra state seat to Bakri. Lau’s oversized seat was split in half (the Maharani name didn’t disappear; it was given to an adjacent state seat under the Muar constituency) and he moved to the western seat of Bentayan with its urban Chinese slice of Muar town, though his narrow margin of 3% was a sign of things to come – indeed the DAP had begun operating a full-time service centre there in hopes of winning the seat. The eastern seat was named Sungai Abong, and in view of the Malay majority here it was returned to UMNO, with Haris Salleh defeating PAS’s Dr. Sheikh Ibrahim Salleh who still runs a clinic in the area.

This was the third straight loss for Sheikh Ibrahim, who had fought the Endau seat in 1990 and Bukit Naning in 1999. Sungai Abong was his worst margin by far. Nonetheless he returned in the drastically more favorable year of 2008 and flipped the seat for PAS as Bentayan also fell to the DAP. Together they gave DAP’s Er Teck Hwa the margin needed to finally flip Bakri; two-term health minister Chua Jui Meng had widened his majority with every election but MCA had not reselected him this time. So Bakri fell to the opposition, only the second time since Independence that it had won a parliamentary seat in Johor. Chua defected to PKR the following year.

Sheikh Ibrahim expanded his majority in 2013 in a rematch with Haris Salleh, continuing to attend to his clinic full-time even during the height of the campaign period. He grew disillusioned with his party’s direction in the early days of Hadi Awang’s leadership but did not leave the party; he did however choose not to run for reelection and predicted stiff winds for Johor PAS in the coming general election. He wasn’t wrong to think so. He and fellow PAS doctor Mohammad Taslim of Maharani had juiced Malay support through their constituency work to around 40% in comparison to the statewide average of 20%, but also benefited from the substantial Chinese vote in their seats. With the creation of “moderate Islamic party” Amanah, the newly minted PAS-less PH was well poised to reap those benefits for itself.

Sungai Abong had given PAS their biggest majority in the state, so Johor Amanah planned its assault carefully. Their candidate for the renamed Simpang Jeram seat ended up being Johor Amanah’s biggest gun Salahuddin Ayub. He led his party to an excellent performance in 2018, picking up nine seats – including all of PAS’s incumbent seats – with Simpang Jeram the safest of them all, a majority of over 7,000 votes with Mohd Mazri Yahya of PAS in a very distant third place (the same Mohd Mazri who contested against Salahuddin and Nur Jazlan in Pulai at the same time, collecting 5%). Things couldn’t have been more different in 2022. Of Amanah’s nine seats, seven fell to BN including Parit Yaani held by Johor Amanah chairman Aminolhuda Hassan, and one (Maharani) returned to its PAS roots by a very narrow margin. Salahuddin was the last man standing, surviving with 41% against a resurgent PAS (second place with 30%) and UMNO (28%).

With Salahuddin’s passing Amanah has lost its representation in the Johor state assembly. In order to recover it the party has selected Nazri Abdul Rahman, an engineer by trade, who currently serves as the Bakri Amanah deputy chief and has been working with the Muar town council for the better part of 30 years; he is in the process of completing a PhD thesis on hydrology systems and tackling flash floods. PAS’s Mohd Mazri is standing again; in addition to continuing the “PAS doctor” tradition that has been so electorally successful here (he is an endovascular surgeon), he also used to serve in the Ministry of Health. The ballot is rounded out by independent S. Jeganathan, a former Bakri MIC treasurer and chairman of a local NGO (and speaker of Hokkien) who has two previous independent campaigns in the adjoining Bukit Naning under his belt.

A recent UTM poll (n=600) of the constituency had 50.83% of respondents say they would vote for the unity government’s candidate against 19.83% who said they would not. 57% of respondents approved of Nazri, 27% of Mazri, and 8% of Jeganathan. Anwar’s approval and disapproval ratings are reported at 55.67% to 28.17%, and those of the unity government are 56.33% to 26.67%. The poll’s breakdown is very similar to the racial and demographic makeup of Simpang Jeram itself but aside from the volatility of individual state constituency polls, this was also conducted before the news of Zahid’s trial. 73% of respondents in the poll knew and approved of the Rahmah initiative. It is very likely that a higher % of voters will know and disapprove of Zahid. So while Nazri is more well-known and well-liked than his opponents, I have a feeling that it will be PAS coming up top on Saturday.

PN gain from PH

[jaichind]

By-election results: PH wins both seats by a solid margin

Pulai Parlimatary
             2022       2023 by-election
PH         55.33              61.54   
BN         27.05   
PN          17.63              37.78


Simpang Jeram state assembly
            2022        2023 by-election
PH        40.94               56.54
BN        28.37
PN        29.72               42.19

Turnout was low.  Ahmad Zahid having his charges dropped clearly hit Chinese turnout hard.  PH won by outperforming in the Malay vote.  It seems the military-police-civil servant Malay vote swung toward PH giving PH an unexpectedly large win despite a clear drop in Chinese turnout.

The main takeaway is that the PN Malay surge has a regional element to it.  It is very strong in the North but the future South you go the weaker the PN Malay wave becomes.

[Joseph Cao]

The Zahid thing clearly affected turnout but I think there are several other factors in this case.

Historically the exception to the usual turnout % for by-elections, around 70-80%, is urban seats with incumbents who died unexpectedly where it usually hovers 10-15% lower. Which of course are usually DAP; see Patto (Bagan, 1995) or Karpal Singh (Bukit Gelugor, 2014) or more recently Stephen Wong (Sandakan, 2019). Mostly holds true as well with state seats and the actual record for lowest turnout in any by-election is Balakong 2018 (Eddie Ng, also DAP).

With Pulai in particular I think a lot of commentators already priced in the substantial % of voters working across the border in Singapore as a given without commenting on its effect on turnout. Including myself – sorry about that.

I have seen estimates that, accounting for turnout, the BN vote transfer in both by-elections was still higher toward PH than people were expecting, which seems about right.

[jaichind]

Should not all turnout numbers in Malaysia have to be re-calibrated since the early 2022 automatic voter registration?  What is low or high pre-2022 and post-2022 will be very different in my view.

[Joseph Cao]

Should not all turnout numbers in Malaysia have to be re-calibrated since the early 2022 automatic voter registration?  What is low or high pre-2022 and post-2022 will be very different in my view.

In general you can take off about 10% to account for that. 47% turnout is still pretty exceptionally bad.

[Joseph Cao]

In actual election-related news the EC went forward with the nullification of the Kuala Terengganu GE15 election result after the BN candidate brought objections on grounds that the PAS incumbent bribed voters. This has been substantiated and as PAS is not appealing the decision, a by-election will be held for the parliamentary seat on the same day as the state elections. Nomination and early voting dates will also happen concurrently with the state ones.

Another one: Kemaman GE15 result nullified on similar grounds.

PAS has a significant problem with handling cash, apparently.

[Joseph Cao]

This Saturday, the 7th, there is a by-election to the Pahang State Legislative Assembly caused by the death of UMNO incumbent Johari Harun in a plane crash on August 17:


N36 Pelangai

GE15 results of parliamentary election in Pelangai by polling district. Blue is BN, red is PH, green is PN.

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Most people experience Pahang’s Bentong District through the winding mountain highway past Genting Highlands and Bentong town, en route to Karak and the East Coast beyond. But Bentong District is also the site of Malaysia’s first FELDA land grant, in Lurah Bilut at its northern tip, a development made possible by the more conventional farmland that covers quite a bit of this district including its eastern portion where our by-election is taking place.

The Pahang River has many headwaters in these mountains; two of its forebears, the Semantan and Teriang rivers, drain a comparatively flat area just east of the Main Range. A trunk road from Karak hugs the foothills as it runs through here and south toward Negeri Sembilan, forming a junction near the state border at a village named Simpang Pelangai in honour of a nearby swamp, or perhaps a tribe that inhabited the area – the etymology is rather muddled. There are plans in the works to increase the prominence of this junction. Bentong–Simpang Pelangai is the newest section, currently under construction, of the LTU expressway running from Kuala Krai to Kuala Pilah, and Anwar’s Budget 2023 contains proposals for a Semenyih–Simpang Pelangai highway to ease congestion on the notorious Kuala Lumpur–Karak “haunted highway” over the mountains.

For now Simpang Pelangai (also locally described as the “end of Pahang“) remains a sleepy town, most accessible from Simpang Durian in Negeri Sembilan to its south. It is the heart of the constituency along with the three adjoining FELDA plantations of Kemansul, Chemomoi, and Kemahal to the east. Pahang used to be the only state which admitted non-residents for FELDA allotment, and the late Sultan Ahmad Shah in an interview recalled walking to Bentong through uncleared jungle, with its danger of tiger attacks, after his Range Rover broke down while overseeing the settlement effort. In the case of Pelangai there seems to have been a more human danger involved: a rash of nocturnal incidents featuring oily handprints on villagers’ walls spooked the original FELDA settlers away, so others from out of state moved in to replace them.

There are villages throughout the area inhabited by Malays of Sumatran (Bangkinang) descent and by the Orang Asli, hubs of self-employment, odd jobs, and homestays for visitors who want a taste of the stunning views and cold air. Chinese and Indian settlements are confined to the mountains in the western part of the seat: in Manchis, named for its historic production of matchwood, which town has seemingly been taken over by the LKE Group (they advertise the nation’s first sharia-compliant durian farming plan, whatever that entails) and in Telemong (also famous for its durians) further up the Karak trunk road. Both were hit hard by flooding from the Telemong river in December 2021. Non-Malays are a relatively small electorate in the Pelangai seat, which as of 2022 has an ethnic breakdown of 72.13% Malay, 18.19% Chinese, 5.71% Indian and 3.96% other ethnicities.

Prior to independence Bentong District sent two representatives to the Pahang State Council, and what is now Pelangai was covered by the Bentong Timor seat which returned UMNO’s Mohamed Salleh Mohamed Zain unopposed on nomination day in 1955, one of seven seats in Pahang to do so. Several weeks later the Semantan federal constituency, a sprawling seat taking in all of Pahang’s mountainous west, gave future Prime Minister Abdul Razak Hussein an 82.5% victory on his way to the Federal Legislative Council.

The Bentong constituency, an MCA berth from the beginning, dates back to the first parliamentary election in 1959. At that election it received four state seats, two of which were Sabai in the eastern part of Bentong District and Mentakab in an adjoining portion of Temerloh District to its north. Mentakab’s first assemblyman was the anonymous Salehuddin Awang Pekan, who transferred to the adjacent Chenor seat in 1964 and made way for the equally anonymous Syed Abdullah Syed Ali who served until 1974. Throughout this period Sabai retained Abu Bakar Haji Ahmad as its assemblyman; he had been a junior assistant in the Bentong Department of Agriculture, helped establish his local UMNO branch in 1949, and served twice in the assembly as an executive councillor. He stepped down in 1974 following a road accident in Kuantan but continued to be active in local politics until his death in 1981. Abu Bakar’s younger brother Shariff Haji Ahmad would go on to become MP for Jerantut in 1978 and subsequently Minister of Agriculture.

In the meantime the 1974 redelineation transferred Mentakab out of the Bentong constituency. Much of its former area went to a new state seat by the name of Semantan, while the western portion of Sabai was put into the new state seat of Karak, centred on the town of the same name. The new assemblymen for both seats served for three terms each. Karak’s Chan Tan Chuan was elected under MCA colours in 1974 and 1978 but defected to Gerakan after that and became its state liaison committee chair before being reelected in 1982. In Semantan, local boy Abdul Malek Mohamed had previously been political secretary to the Minister of Youth, Culture, and Sports. He was elected at the comparatively young age of 37 and became Bentong UMNO chief that year, also serving briefly as an exco after the 1978 election.

Abdul Malek was still Bentong UMNO chief when he left the state assembly in 1986, the year the Bentong parliamentary constituency became coterminous with Bentong District for the first time (excising what remained of the old Mentakab seat) thanks to a round of redelineation. The newly created seat of Pelangai therefore had no incumbent. Its inaugural election was won by a 36-year-old local boy, at the time prepping for a bachelor’s degree in law, who would become Bentong UMNO chief the following year. Adnan Yaakob further became an exco in 1990 and then menteri besar of Pahang in 1999, a position he would go on to hold for 19 years as the longest-serving state executive in Pahang’s history.

Adnan’s first notable action in the wake of the 1998 financial crisis was to overhaul some state economic projects, angering many party fellows who had fingers in those pies; Mahathir appointed him as Pahang UMNO chief the following year to shore up his political position. But despite this Adnan’s management of the state has not been notably positive. It was reported in 2016 that Pahang owed the federal government over 3 billion ringgit, and Adnan claimed these were accumulated from his predecessor who had been out of office for seventeen years. Various environmental crises – the Lynas rare earths plant, the Bukit Goh illegal bauxite mining, the Cameron Highlands landslides – have percolated for years, made worse by his own intransigence. Consider a small selection of his personal controversies:

• On nomination day for a 2000 by-election in the nearby Sanggang constituency, Adnan was filmed making a dirty hand gesture toward opposition supporters
• He had no love for the Himpunan Hijau environmental movement and often derided them using language not suitable for this forum
• He attempted to bribe a protestor to leave his office
• Unsurprisingly he has addressed reporters as “stupid,” “moronic,” and “mentally retarded” on different occasions
• On one of these occasions he smacked a recording device out of a reporter’s hand
• In the run-up to the 2013 general election he boasted that Bentong incumbent and MCA president Liew Tiong Lai could not possibly lose his race, and that if DAP candidate Wong Tack (the leader of Himpunan Hijau) won he, Adnan, would cut off his ears and jump in the Pahang River
• He then claimed it was just a figure of speech
• He told DAP assemblyman Tengku Zulpuri Shah Raja Puji, with whom he had been quarreling, to “join [him] outside” the assembly chambers
• He waved out of his office a group of Cameron Highlands farmers petitioning for rights to their land, telling them if they had waited 40 years to own land they could wait another ten years, and that they “talked too much”

There was a general view by 2018 that he had served long enough, despite still being in good health – during a 2016 assembly sitting he lifted his foot to his face and gripped a pen between his toes to demonstrate this – and so Adnan signalled his retirement from the top job ahead of the 2018 election when his margin in Pelangai sank to 52.40% against PKR's 30.00% and PAS's 17.60%. This was the same election in which Liow Tiong Lai lost his rematch with Wong Tack. The DAP now held Bentong and three of its four state seats. All of them had been BN-held at the beginning of Adnan’s time as menteri besar.

Adnan finally retired in 2022 after a quiet term on the backbenches while receiving his long-delayed bachelor’s degree in law and a GPA of 3.62 (good enough for the Rector’s List), relinquishing Pelangai to Johari Harun. Johari had founded the aviation-oriented Gading Group before entering politics through Bentong UMNO where he became youth chief in 2008 and deputy chief in 2018 in addition to retaining his Kampung Sum-Sum branch chairmanship. As youth chief he had also been director of YP Maintenance, an unknown company registered just two days before Pahang’s state executive council awarded it a lucrative seven-year contract to maintain the state’s roads. Earlier this year Johari became Bentong UMNO chief, and he was said to be in line to lead Pahang UMNO eventually. In Pahang’s current state government lineup he had been the exco for local government, housing, environment, and green technology.

On August 17, Johari went to Langkawi on official business with other members of the state executive council and later boarded a light aircraft bound for Sultan Abdul Aziz Shah Airport in Subang. Minutes before arrival the plane nosedived and crashed on a highway near the Elmina township, killing all onboard plus two motorists caught in the explosion. The accident investigation is still working its way through the Ministry of Transport but its preliminary report has strongly suggested mechanical failure. This is not the first plane crash in Elmina, which lies under the airport’s flight path: in 1977 Japan Air Lines Flight 715 (from Tokyo, via Hong Kong) hit the side of a hill in the then-Elmina oil palm estate, killing 34 people, after being unable to locate the Sultan Abdul Aziz Shah runway in bad weather conditions. Coincidentally the two tragedies took place twenty-three years either side of the new millennium.

UMNO’s flag features a keris, which popularly symbolises Malay nationalism and the Malay struggle. In 2006 Adnan Yaakob had opined that the keris was bad optics for UMNO since it also denoted quarrels, and suggested that it be replaced with a pen or a coin – both very good symbols of Pahang state politics. Pahang BN is still in a position to wield the pen and the coin under Adnan’s successor as menteri besar Wan Rosdy Wan Ismail, but only just (as a matter of fact PN will become the largest coalition in the assembly if it wins this by-election; BN already has a pact with PH, which held the balance of power after last year’s elections, so a loss here will not directly threaten the state government as many in PN are claiming).

That is the direction in which UMNO’s defending candidate Amizar Abu Adam has been tacking. A businessman and Bentong UMNO central committee member who lost a nailbiter to DAP’s Thomas Su in Bentong’s Ketari state seat last year, he has been active in Pelangai and his native FELDA Chemomoi for decades, though he recently failed in his bid for the vice-chairmanship of Bentong UMNO. The local boy consideration is particularly important given that both Adnan and Johari were well-regarded as approachable and known quantities. Amizar has touted many of Johari’s plans as a “Pelangai Gateway” manifesto, including implementation of the planned highways through Simpang Pelangai, and Adnan has returned to the campaign trail alongside various BN big guns to hammer his message of local development.

The “Malay struggle” narrative has been enthusiastically taken up by PN leaders on behalf of Bentong PAS vice-chief and Pelangai constituency coordinator Kasim Samat, who returns after contesting against Johari in GE15. On that occasion Johari had taken 57.71% of the vote against Kasim's 25.74%, with 16.04% going to Ahmad Wafiuddin Shamsuri of Amanah. Kasim’s father founded the PAS chapter in FELDA Chemomoi; Kasim had tutored a teenage Amizar for the SPM examinations as a young biology teacher there some thirty years ago, but he only returned to the area three months prior to last year’s elections. He claims to have received a much better reception this campaign period than he did last year, as the national issues PAS is riding have presumably been finding traction.

Dissatisfaction with UMNO’s national standing (in addition to not being happy with its choice of Amizar) is also the ostensible reason for the independent bid of businessman and children’s NGO president Haslihelmy DM Zulhasli, native of Kampung Sum-Sum, who has been sacked from the party for contesting – though beforehand he also spread a not terribly credible rumor that he was being considered as the PN candidate. Both challengers have opted to focus on door-to-door campaigning which makes it a bit difficult to assess the overall response to their candidacies.

This by-election will be decided in the FELDA settlements that attracted much of the seat’s electorate, propelled the agricultural inclinations of every one of its previous assemblymen, are home to its two main candidates, and whose three polling districts split 2-1 for BN last year though all had extremely narrow margins. UMNO’s FELDA vote held in Negeri Sembilan in August; it failed in Pahang last year. If BN holds the line with FELDA settlers in Pelangai, with its close ties to Negeri Sembilan, Amizar will be the new assemblyman. If it slides further then PAS is likely to snap the UMNO streak in this seat.

To that end Universiti Malaya’s Academy of Malay Studies conducted a constituency poll (n=1,772) between September 29 and October 2, which had low response rates from non-Malays and is thus better understood as a Malay poll with 86.9% of respondents reporting that ethnicity. It had very few undecideds – 55.5% of respondents planned to vote for Amizar, 43.2% for Kasim (for reference the PN parliamentary candidate for Bentong polled 40.4% in this seat last year). Respondents thought the state unity government in Pahang should be maintained, 58.6% to 13.5% with 27.9% unsure; similar sentiments were gauged for the federal unity government, 50.8% to 30.0% with 19.2% unsure. Approval ratings gathered by the poll were 93.1% for the late Johari Harun, 80.9% for Pahang menteri besar Wan Rosdy, and 60.2% for Anwar, who nonetheless maintained majority approval among respondents from FELDA areas. So signals seem to be that BN is still afloat here, but of course we will find out more about that on Saturday when the polls close. Stay tuned…

BN hold

[AustralianSwingVoter]

On August 17, Johari went to Langkawi on official business with other members of the state executive council and later boarded a light aircraft bound for Sultan Abdul Aziz Shah Airport in Subang. Minutes before arrival the plane nosedived and crashed on a highway near the Elmina township, killing all onboard plus two motorists caught in the explosion. The accident investigation is still working its way through the Ministry of Transport but its preliminary report has strongly suggested mechanical failure. This is not the first plane crash in Elmina, which lies under the airport’s flight path: in 1977 Japan Air Lines Flight 715 (from Tokyo, via Hong Kong) hit the side of a hill in the then-Elmina oil palm estate, killing 34 people, after being unable to locate the Sultan Abdul Aziz Shah runway in bad weather conditions. Coincidentally the two tragedies took place twenty-three years either side of the new millennium.

[jaichind]

Pelangai by-election results: BN wins with ease

BN       62.4%
PN       37.3%

Back in 2022, it was

BN      57.7%
PN      25.7%
PH      16.0%



It seems BN get the support of the PH vote while limiting any loss of its Malay vote to PN

[Joseph Cao]

A by-election this Saturday to the Sarawak State Legislative Assembly, after PBB incumbent Talib Zulpilip died on September 15 of kidney complications:

N67 Jepak

“The village is chiefly formed by the houses of the Mellanaos beyond the Chinese kampong. These Mellanaos used to live further up the river, but since the construction of the fort, and the installation of an officer of the Rajah near the mouth of the river, they came to settle near the sea… Their houses are built on both sides of the river, always on high piles, and with materials mostly furnished by the nipa and sago palms.”

—Odoardo Beccari, at the mouth of the Kemena river

GE15 parliamentary results in Jepak by polling district. Orange-red is GPS.

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Welcome to Bintulu and welcome to Sarawak. Visitors hearing this will have arrived via the Bintulu airport, legendary for a long time as the world’s only airport built in the town center. But that was before Bintulu attained its current heady heights as a capital of energy industry, and in 2003 the airport was relocated into empty land to the south and west – if you squint you can see its runway on the map above – which is going to the polls this by-election as part of the state seat of Jepak.

For the history of its namesake we must go back past the quote above from Italian botanist Odoardo Beccari, on the occasion of his visit to Bintulu on August 13, 1867. His description is wrong in at least one respect. This region was first settled by the Vaie Segan, who are classed as Melanau on the census but are emphatically different from the Melanau of the Rajang basin further south; among other differences they have a distinct language that is conjectured to have some Italian influence, of all things. They migrated from further upriver and became renowned for fishing in their new coastal home, as well as for driving off Sulu pirates on multiple occasions. The Vaie did have settlements on both sides of the river, though, and the villages of the south bank have so far escaped being swallowed up by the Bintulu urban area.

The largest of these villages – Malay-Muslim like the others; many Vaie converted throughout the 20th century – is Kampung Jepak on the south bank. Named after a branching (pipak in the Vaie dialect) stream which watered the settlement, it was established by Vaie from upriver who were ordered by Charles Brooke to move closer to his new fort where Bintulu stands today. Aside from farming and fishing and associated output (sago and shrimp products for example, including Bintulu’s famous belacan) Kampung Jepak also benefits from its proximity to Bintulu’s ready supply of tourists eager to visit a traditional fishing village, undoubtedly a boost for the local MP, Minister of Tourism and human caricature Tiong King Sing.

But traditional village industries are on their way out and the Sarawak government has bigger plans for Jepak. For them the empty land across from Bintulu town is a perfect solution to its housing woes, so the Jepak Jaya project will see large plots of housing spring up between the village and the airport. The Jepak Industrial Estate lies east of the village (outside the constituency) and together with the Kemena Industrial Estate across the river was the brainchild of Kampung Jepak’s famous son, former chief minister Abdul Rahman Ya’kub, who was born here in 1928 but whose family left soon after. We will return to that family of his shortly.



As the inset shows, not counting the Pier 99 commercial complex on the Bintulu waterfront (population: zero), three of Jepak’s six polling districts lie on the Bintulu side of the river. These villages retain the same ethnic makeup as their counterparts on the other bank, but they are well-connected to Bintulu town while residents of Kampung Jepak must use the ferry. There are plans to relocate them to Jepak Jaya across the river so as to make way for more housing tracts. Currently the only way to cross the river by road is the Kemena Bridge, built during Bintulu’s first boom in the 1970s to connect the two industrial estates. This will soon change as another bridge is being constructed at the river mouth by the Hong Kong Stock Exchange-listed China Communications Construction Group; it will cut travel time between Kampung Jepak and the town from twenty-five to under ten minutes. Besides being one of the pet projects of local MP, China shill, and drunk uncle of Sarawak politics Tiong King Sing, however, the Bintulu–Jepak bridge will not alter the noncontiguity of the Jepak seat as currently drawn.

That brings us back to the southern half of the seat. Originally prize timber territory supplying the industrial estates up north, swathes of this land have been repurposed for equally lucrative ends. To the west the seat runs down the coast to Kuala Tatau, a village at the mouth of the eponymous river, and the Tatau estate of the state-owned Sarawak Oil Palm Sdn Bhd. To the south the seat follows the Segan river as far as the sprawling Almabumi oil palm plantation, of the functionally also state-owned BBC Plantation Group. (BBC also has a plantation to the west of the airport.) It will be clear that the powers-that-be in Jepak are not far removed from their sago-making days, despite the difference in scale, having merely switched to a different palm product.

Overall Jepak is a Malay-majority constituency, the only one in Bintulu, clocking in at 55.2% Malay, 36.0% Iban/Dayak, 7.2% Chinese, and 1.6% other ethnicities (including Bidayuh and Orang Ulu) as of 2016. The 2021 election recorded a slight decline to 54.9% Malay, and 2022’s automatic voter registration has expanded the electorate to 22,804 from 14,643 a year earlier. But it’s unlikely that its basic demographic makeup has changed.

Visitors to Pier 99 Bintulu may spot a memorial tower across the street marking the site where the Sarawak Council Negri first met in September 1867, a month after Odoardo Beccari came through the area. It is the oldest continuously functioning legislature in Malaysia. However there were not direct elections to the body until a century later, and when the franchise was established Sarawak used a three-tiered system where the electorate voted for district councillors who voted to elevate themselves to the divisional councils, which in turn would appoint members to the state assembly. Bintulu district council was established with appointed members in 1956 and its first elections were held in 1959 under this system.

Political parties were not established in Sarawak until around 1960. As a quick rundown in order of establishment there were the SUPP, an essentially Chinese outfit then being infiltrated by communists, though this would eventually be fixed; the PANAS, a predominantly Malay outfit; and an “Alliance” coalition of SNAP (multiracial), PESAKA (Dayak-multiracial), BERJASA (Malay, ties to UMNO), and SCA (Chinese) constructed on the Peninsular model. Bintulu was an early Alliance bastion against the sea of independents in rural northern Sarawak who continued to be suspicious of party affiliation, and in the 1963 state election two Bintulu district councillors got to the Council Negri with Alliance coupons.

In the closest result of the council Kambar Bubin of BERJASA won the Upper Bintulu ward by four votes, defeating his predecessors on the council, Yaman Pedol of PANAS and independent Atahar Khan Akbar Khan; he is recorded in a Council Negri debate questioning then-works minister Taib Mahmud about the prospects for improving Bintulu’s roads. Fittingly his name now graces one of the main roads in Bintulu town. (Later in that debate a question was raised regarding the construction of Bintulu’s airport. Rest assured we haven’t seen the last of this airport yet.)

The nearby Sungai Sebauh ward elected Penghulu Abok Jalin of PESAKA unopposed. His grandfather Penghulu Jelani was one of the original Iban settlers in Bintulu, having petitioned Charles Brooke for land there (and his grandson Jame Stephen Randi currently holds a position in Kemena PKR). Abok had been his village's headman since 1948 and was nominated to the first Bintulu council in 1956 but stepped down in 1959. When the Council Negri began electing its members directly from constituencies in 1969-70 he transferred easily to the new Kemena seat.

The Alliance won only 23 of 48 seats that election after SNAP left the coalition. When PESAKA was on the verge of joining SNAP and SUPP over its refusal to accept Abdul Rahman Ya’kub as chief minister, Abok was kidnapped by Rahman’s men and (along with fellow Iban leader Simon Dembab Maja) lured into the government with the offer of a ministerial post. PESAKA was forced to affirm its support for the government to prevent more leaders from being fished, and eventually it folded entirely into Rahman’s Parti Bumiputera, itself a merger of PANAS and BERJASA. The resultant PBB is still the dominant party in Sarawak politics. Abok Jalin did pretty well out of it too, as his remaining term in the assembly saw him hold ministerial portfolios for welfare, culture, and local government.

While all this was going on the new Tatau constituency, which covers all of today’s Jepak seat, was electing someone actually from the area we’re concerned with. Awang Ismail Pengiran Zainuddin had been councillor for the Jepak ward of Bintulu district council since 1960 without interruption. He served dutifully in the Alliance all through this period and so there is nothing interesting written about him.

SNAP was the only opposition party left after the co-opting of SUPP and PESAKA. In the 1974 election these two parties hemorrhaged support thanks to their perceived subservience to the Malay front, the Chinese and Dayak vote swinging to SNAP; the sizable presence of both ethnic groups in Tatau swept SNAP’s Joseph Mamat Samuel into the assembly. Rahman played the same card as before and invited SNAP to join the ruling coalition, which it did in 1976. Nothing is permanent in Sarawak politics.

As one of the “professional” Dayaks joining the party slate in 1974, Joseph Samuel fell into the Dayak faction in SNAP along with Leo Moggie Irok and Daniel Tajem against the James Wong faction. This fissure was easily exploited by the rest of the coalition. An early example involved the deputy chief minister's post vacated by the resignation of SNAP president Dunstan Endawie in 1980. The Dayak faction swung party support behind Joseph Samuel; instead Rahman appointed Daniel Tajem, hoping to play party members off against each other. How the fissure grew beyond repair has been extensively discussed elsewhere so for now we will skip ahead to 1983 and the formation of the Parti Bangsa Dayak Sarawak (PBDS), the splinter party led by Leo Moggie, for which Joseph Samuel became the inaugural secretary-general.

Which makes it all the more intriguing that despite PBDS being admitted into the coalition by new chief minister Taib Mahmud, on nomination day for the 1983 state election Joseph Samuel was disqualified as a candidate after mistakes were discovered in his nomination papers. Taib had decided to make SNAP and PBDS duke it out for the sixteen seats SNAP had previously held; PBDS now faced the prospect of losing to SNAP candidate Ting Ling Kiew, the incumbent MP for Bintulu. The party threw its support behind independent candidate Bolhassan Kambar, son of Kambar Bubin, inviting him to join PBDS after the election. Given the ethnic polarization at play it should come as no surprise that the Dayak vote was split, the Chinese candidate lost, and the Malay candidate won.

Rahman at this point had a desire to coup his nephew and recover his old job. Coincidentally their first public spat centered on That Airport, with Rahman, in a calculated move to embarrass Taib, interrupting his nephew’s speech during the opening of the Kidurong port facility in 1983 to criticize the federal Transport Minister in attendance for not helping Bintulu build a new airport. Matters came to a head in March 1987 when Rahman rounded up twenty-seven assemblymen including several ministers and all of PBDS at the Ming Court Hotel in Kuala Lumpur, with the intention of no-confidencing Taib. Taib called their bluff and dissolved the assembly. In the resulting snap election PBDS and Rahman’s vehicle PERMAS snatched 20 of 48 seats as their Dayak nationalism once again swung votes for the opposition.

Bolhassan Kambar was involved in the “Ming Court Affair” and narrowly won reelection that year in his 76% Iban seat, despite Joseph Samuel’s dramatic exit from the party midway through the campaign which triggered a public spat over the latter’s professed disappointment with not being offered to contest again and the Dayak PBDS’s subservience to Rahman (Joseph Samuel’s words) and his dire personal finances and about-face from previous Rahman support (PBDS’s words). Faced with another unwieldy opposition after the election, Taib – like his uncle before him – began engineering defections. Bolhassan was one of nine opposition members to join Taib's coalition, where he stayed for the remainder of his term.

There was a redelineation in the meantime, approved by Parliament just too late to be used in 1987, which scattered present-day Jepak across three seats. The western farms around Kuala Tatau were put into Balingian, a seat so monolithically Melanau that the incumbent Abdul Ajis Abdul Majeed later ceded it to Taib; Abdul Ajis had just defeated Rahman’s nephew Wan Habib Syed Mahmud, a PBB rebel like his uncle. The redelineation also blew up the longstanding east-west orientation of Bintulu’s two state constituencies: its Iban would now be split between the coastal Kidurong and the inland Kemena. Kemena was then held by ex-state assembly speaker Celestine Ujang Jilan, who succeeded Abok Jalin to the seat back in 1974 and had held various ministerial positions. For the 1991 election he defeated PBDS’s Stephen Randi Sekalai, father of Jame Stephen Randi.

Kidurong, taking in both banks of the river mouth, was 41% Iban and 40% Chinese and in a reflection of receding Dayak influence it was allocated to the SUPP over SNAP. This being the SUPP, things rapidly devolved into quarreling. Bintulu SUPP wanted local boy Nicholas Tang to contest; party leadership imposed former civil servant Michael Sim, who had served in the area and whose wife was local. Sim defeated two ex-BN comrades to win the inaugural Kidurong election in 1991. Freshly-retired Bintulu MP Ting Ling Kiew ran on the PBDS ticket (lol) and came second. DAP’s Chiew Chiu Sing, a former SUPP rising star who would defeat SNAP president James Wong for the same parliamentary seat a few years down the road, came third.

Another redelineation pushed Kidurong’s southern boundary up to the river, which along with Sim’s continued local travails was enough to put DAP’s Wong Sing Ai ahead by 22 votes in the 1996 election. This was annulled in court and Sim won the resulting by-election in 1997. But going into 2001 he had the unenviable distinction of being the only BN candidate to lose to DAP, this time to Chiew Chiu Sing who had lost his parliamentary berth to SNAP’s shiny new recruit Tiong King Sing in 1999. Chiew won by increasing margins in this Chinese seat over the next several elections.

Back to 1996. A seat named Jepak was put on the map that year, covering pretty much everything in the current constituency south of the river. It was won by PBB’s Talib Zulpilip. A Kuala Tatau native of Vaie descent whose great-grandfather had founded the village, Talib pursued business degrees in New Zealand before returning to be engaged by the Sarawak government in several positions overseeing industrial development. He acquitted himself well under the tutelage of then-industrial development minister Abang Johari Openg and was appointed chairman of the Sarawak Economic Development Corporation (SEDC) in 1995, a year before his superiors asked him to run for the newly created Jepak seat.

Talib then collected a trusted right-hand man, Jepak PBB deputy chief Saidi Abang Samsudin, owner of Bintulu car rental company Jepak Holdings. Saidi’s political connections also included Najib Razak and Rosmah Mansor, and in 2016 that Prime Minister awarded a 1.25 billion-ringgit project to Jepak Holdings to supply and install solar energy at 369 rural Sarawak schools reliant on diesel generators for electricity. It will of course be noted that car rental companies are not usually beneficiaries of such largesse or capable of making such installations. It will further be noted that Najib personally rushed the project past clearance and continued to ignore concerns from underlings and pay Jepak Holdings while it was busy not working on the project. As of 2018 nearly half the schools had not received their panels; under its contract Jepak Holdings had also taken over their existing diesel supply for a tidy profit.

In a corruption trial that snared ex-Minister of Education Mahdzir Khalid and his chief secretary Alias Ahmad among others, Rosmah was charged with inducing and receiving bribes totaling hundreds of millions of ringgit from Saidi to grease the skids on this project. She was found guilty in September 2022 on three counts of bribery and sentenced to ten years’ jail time. She has about 17 more outstanding charges. One wonders what Jepak Holdings’ local MP, erstwhile manager of the Port Klang Free Zone basket case, and literal money man Tiong King Sing makes of this – he was alleged years ago to have given Rosmah free rides in his company’s private jet (weekly flights to Bintulu Airport on Tiong Airways!).

While Jepak was becoming a household name in this manner Talib Zulpilip had been busy climbing the ranks of state government. On top of his SEDC berth he was made head of the Sarawak Tourism Board in 2009, deputy minister of tourism in 2012, deputy minister of infrastructure development in 2016, and minister in the chief minister’s department for “Integrity and Ombudsman” upon Abang Jo's ascension to the top job in 2017 (a particularly ironic one given what his deputy was up to). He has thus presided over the genesis of the Jepak Jaya project from a position of authority for most of the areas it touches.

Talib only ever dropped below 65% of the vote once, during the good opposition year of 2011; over six elections his opponents have included ex-assemblyman Bolhassan Kambar (2001) and Bintulu PKR secretary Abdul Jalil Bujang (2011, 2016). Despite calls from Jepak PBB for Talib to step down ahead of 2021 and take care of his declining health (led, intriguingly, by Saidi Abang Samsudin) it was his involvement with Jepak Jaya that persuaded Abang Jo to slate him for another term. Talib’s health declined further this year and on September 14, having missed a few assembly sittings, he was admitted to hospital in Kuching. He died the following evening of complications to the kidneys, liver, and heart.

Earlier I said there is nothing permanent in Sarawak politics. That is partially untrue. The closest thing to permanence is the ongoing Malay/Melanau dominance of a highly diverse state, thanks to the Alliance formula never breaking down here as it did in Peninsular Malaysia. Between uncle Rahman and nephew Taib this has not exactly been a positive for most Sarawakians outside their family circle, but don’t expect those going to the polls in Rahman’s birthplace to agree, especially given the obvious signs of development from Talib’s Jepak Jaya handiwork. It is a dead certainty that GPS’s sweep on the map above will be replicated again.

This by-election in an already easy seat has been made much breezier for GPS. PH, despite being in opposition in the assembly, have elected not to contest on grounds of respecting the unity government arrangement. PN, despite being in opposition in Parliament, have elected not to contest on grounds of focusing on the upcoming Kemaman by-election. Wong Soon Koh vehicle PSB, runner-up in 2021, has elected not to contest on grounds of having entered into a confidence-and-supply agreement with Abang Jo’s government. MUDA, which had teased its first by-election contest in the name of “preserving democracy” while condemning PH’s “hypocrisy” in sitting this out, has not managed to scrape up a candidate.

The lucky beneficiary of all this is PBB’s defending candidate, ethnic Vaie and career government servant Iskandar Turkee, who most recently served as Sarawak director of the National Anti-Drug Agency. He has resigned his post to contest the by-election. Democracy is being preserved with or without MUDA, in spite of deputy PM Fadillah Yusof and PBB deputy president Awang Tengah Ali Hassan arrogantly calling for Iskandar to win uncontested. Stevenson Joseph Sumbang, a former policeman, came third in 2021 under the pro-independence Parti Bumi Kenyalang banner and is running again. ASPIRASI candidate Chieng Lea Phing owns half a dozen small businesses in the constituency; among them is a pawnshop which got into trouble recently for distributing free rice to its hard-up customers, and Chieng has been notified that the MACC is taking an interest in him.

That’s all we have about Jepak. I note that the local MP, King of Bintulu, recently-back-in-the-news-again Tiong King Sing has been mentioned in passing several times; please be aware this does not even begin to scratch the surface of this guy. Perhaps if we ever return to Bintulu I’ll write more about him… but given his track record of gatecrashing I shall have to avoid doing so while in an airport.

GPS hold

[Joseph Cao]

Jepak results: unsurprising North Korean margin.

GPS           88.24%
PBK           7.82%
ASPIRASI   3.95%

Previous results:

GPS           69.44%
PSB           22.50%
PBK           6.49%
IND           1.56%

Nothing very interesting but the anti-GPS vote is concentrated in a single polling district as expected.

[Joseph Cao]

Probably not worth making its own thread for but the constituency redelineation process is officially starting up again, with the report for Sarawak, last redelineated in 2015, being tabled a few days ago. The actual redelineation report should take about two years based on past form. We can expect the same process for Sabah to begin in 2025, and for Peninsular Malaysia to begin in 2026.

Sarawak of course has a much larger number of seats (31) than its population alone justifies, but a combination of large rural areas and the East Malaysia rule has kept things the way they are, and early reports are that at least two new constituencies are being proposed which will be the first time since 2005 that new parliamentary seats have been created in the state.

GE15 results in Miri by polling district; orange-red is GPS and red is PH.

There is a new seat proposed in the Miri area on the basis of overpopulation, Miri being the most oversized seat in Sarawak with 143,229 electors. The Election Commission's proposed remedy is to split off the Senadin state constituency which has the largest population of Miri's three state seats. Senadin is the two massive polling districts north and east of the city on the map above, based around the Kuala Baram industrial estate. It just so happens to be the most strongly GPS area in the seat, even more so at the state level, so this is a freebie seat for GPS who have failed to win back the PH-held Miri for a few cycles now. There are five other seats (Stampin, Bintulu, Petra Jaya, Bandar Kuching, and Sibu) with populations above the national average, so we shall see if those come up in the final report.

For the second change we know of so far, Hulu Rajang (34,080 km², just over a quarter of Sarawak's total area; 43,438 electors, well under both the national and Sarawak population average) is set to be split up on the justification that its area is too large to service properly. Hulu Rajang in approximately its current form has existed, and been serviced, since 1968. Another free seat for GPS.

[jaichind]

https://www.malaymail.com/news/malaysia/2023/11/13/sabah-cm-early-state-polls-could-be-a-possibility/101874

"Sabah CM: Early state polls could be a possibility "

If there is an election it will be GRS vs WARISAN-UMNO.  It is not clear which side PH will come down and most likely PH runs separately.   The trend in Sabah is more negative toward Peninsular  Malay parties. If you take that into account I suspect GRS will sweep and UMNO and PH will both underperform if not get wiped out.

[Joseph Cao]

There is a by-election to Parliament this weekend after the annulment of PAS incumbent Che Alias Hamid’s win last year on grounds of vote-buying:

P40 Kemaman

“Hacked out of the surrounding swamp was this enclave of dusty new two-storey shophouses… The development baked in an airless sink of heat. There was no organic connection between that crescent of new concrete and its surrounding environment. Development was an overlay; it did not grow from the land, nor feed off it. It replaced the land, with something presumably more economically viable.”

—Rehman Rashid, Peninsula (2016)

Annulled GE15 results in Kemaman: green is PN.

Spoiler alert! Click Show to show the content.

Show

For the second time this year we are back in Terengganu for a by-election, in Kemaman which is 94.1% Malay, 5.0% Chinese, 0.5% Indian and 0.4% other ethnicities – the second-least Malay seat in the state. Its boundaries are coterminous with the administrative Kemaman District, the state’s southernmost, so it provides outsiders with their first impression of Terengganu as they enter via the highways ribboning up from Kuantan. Quoted above is the first impression of acclaimed writer Rehman Rashid, written on a very similar highway trip from Kemaman town at the mouth of its eponymous river.

That river lies behind an amusing cartographical accident. In the late 19th century the British wanted to demarcate the border between Pahang, under their administration, and Terengganu, still a protectorate of the Kingdom of Siam. Debate centered on the part of the boundary by the coast, between Kemaman and the timber-rich land near Gebeng. In a series of treaties Britain and Siam agreed to draw the border at “the southern drainage of the Kemaman river… then the northern drainage of the Chendar river,“ but not having explored far up the Kemaman – under Siamese territory, remember – the British did not seem to realize that it is far longer and with a larger drainage area than they thought (it’s the longest river in the state, longer even than Terengganu’s eponymous river). So Terengganu (and Kemaman District with it) juts far to the south to cover the river’s headwaters, producing the weird spur in Pahang's boundary.

Kemaman town is better known to out-of-staters and Google Maps as Chukai. Its written records date back to 1810 when it came under the Terengganu Sultanate’s control. The name comes from taxes imposed on riverine traffic at its mouth where the town stands, and it passed on to the smaller Chukai river which also empties into the ocean here and creates swampy mangrove land known for a wide variety of fish and wildlife. The town is notable for its coffee and food – the local residents have good if over-sweetened taste buds. (Which may explain the antics of local assemblyman Hanafiah Mat, who earlier this year recorded a TikTok video of himself pouring orange juice on his meal and captioned it with a mocking reference to Menu Rahmah before deleting it after backlash.)

The main development here begun just outside town in the 1970s with the construction of Kemaman Port, a general-purpose port for the oil and gas flowing ashore to the north with several terminals and a supply base. In the 1980s it boasted a steel production plant, Perwaja, capable of processing and casting Terengganu’s iron ore within reach of the ships docking here. But between the failure of Japanese technical investments in the plant, plunging steel markets, and recurring mismanagement involving his buddy the since-disgraced tycoon Eric Chia (alleged to have siphoned millions of Perwaja’s money into a fictitious Hong Kong company) Mahathir’s flagship steel plant became a financial disaster of epic proportions. Losses were estimated in the neighborhood of 15 billion ringgit. The Perwaja plant finally folded in 2013 and the center of Kemaman Port is still occupied by its empty shell.

Other main towns in this district are strung out to the north along the coast. A drive out of Chukai on Federal Route 3 takes you past the swamps toward a new Giant hypermarket plopped incongruously into the mist-shrouded wilderness, rumored by local residents to be haunted. This is the approach to Kijal, which has made the most of its central location on the coast with a spanking big golf and spa resort courtesy of the Genting Group. These two constructions are related – put a pin in them. Next we have Kemasik, grower of the Terengganu pepper historically renowned as far off as China and as near at hand as the royal city; it was the reclusive Sultan Zainal Abidin III who opened plantations of the crop here. Today its main landmark is a one-storey mall which until recently had the only cinema in the state, though it still boasts excellent fried snacks and a pristine beach.

Furthest to the north is Kerteh, where Petronas refines its crude oil and gas from the offshore oil-well juggernaut a short hop to the north (natural gas is also piped south to Kemaman Port). It also functions as a bedroom community for industry workers, many of them foreign. Prices here are thus on par with the notoriously high-cost Klang Valley. Tucked away in this industrial complex are a few manufacturers of high-pressure waterjets: vital components for petroleum refineries and plants to produce the fuel and chemicals which drive the country’s industries.

Once upon a time Petronas had a railway running from Kerteh to the Kuantan port meant to transport industrial raw materials, inauspiciously opened on April 1, 2004; to quote a recent assessment it was “poorly designed, poorly built, and poorly supervised.” It had to be operated well below its design speed for safety reasons, became unprofitable, and folded after six years. Parts of the land (never returned to their original owners after acquisition by Petronas) have been reappropriated for the East Coast Rail Link, for which track installation is set to begin at the end of this year with a portion running through here north from Kuantan Port towards Dungun.

Motorists in more of a hurry can bypass all this via the East Coast Expressway, of tortured history in this part of the country. PAS took over the state for a single term in 1999 on the strength of their opposition to toll collection, particularly on this planned expressway, so its construction was halted at the border with the highway initially opening only as far as Kuantan. It reached here in 2015 after many delays involving Terengganu’s BN state government inserting its fingers into the construction of this federal pie.

That leaves the interior, an area relatively far removed from anywhere else even today – surely even more so in the days when Kemaman District was a hotbed of communist activity in the state, with major attacks including the killing of Terengganu State Councillor Wan Ngah Wan Mamat in 1948. He owned a mine here; the industry persisted well into the 20th century. Rubber was a major crop in the district and accounted for the state’s largest area of rubber cultivation. So too is rice, although one corner of this district has something extra going for it: Kampung Dadong was the site of a 2016 Ministry of Agriculture pilot project to cultivate corn in paddy fields and lessen Malaysia’s dependence on importing corn for its livestock feed. Put a pin in that too.

Terengganu was actually the first state to be declared “white” or free of danger from communist attacks, in 1957. Malay nationalism was rooted in the same impulse for self-determination and treated similarly by the British; one of the parties banned during the Emergency was the Malay Nationalist Party (PKMM), which had close ties to the communists – some of their supporters in Kemaman also took up arms against the British. So UMNO sang the tune of Malay welfare when it first landed in Terengganu, benefiting from the Emergency-era political vacuum and lack of competition from other nationalist parties. In fact it was a well-known ex-PKMM leader, Wan Yahya Wan Mohamed, who ran and won in 1955 as an Alliance candidate for the Trengganu Selatan constituency covering this area.

PAS and its Islam-tinted “Malay struggle” arrived in time to benefit from dissatisfaction among some UMNO members over the non-Malay parties in the Alliance framework, becoming the clear second party in the state. Its Kemaman branch was also established in 1957. State and federal elections in Terengganu were held separately in 1959 – state in June, federal in August – and PAS unexpectedly formed the state government, reducing the Alliance to seven seats, before following up with a commanding performance in the parliamentary seats.

This election also saw the debut of the Kemaman parliamentary seat with boundaries stretching up to the Dungun river. Immediately it gained a reputation as the Alliance’s beachhead. Four of their seven state seats lay here, a sweep for the coalition. Wan Yahya was unopposed in August even as he became the only UMNO MP to win in Terengganu. But Wan Yahya butted heads with the “autocratic” Terengganu UMNO chief, Ibrahim Fikri, and in 1963 he resigned as head of the Kemaman division in protest. He was not reselected in 1964. For this election UMNO recruited more candidates with religious backgrounds as a counter to the PAS takeover, many of them graduates of Egypt’s al-Azhar University; one of them, Wan Mokhtar Ahmad, replaced Wan Yahya on the ballot.

To gather support for his reselection Wan Yahya continued to be active in Kemaman, establishing branches and recruiting members independently of Ibrahim Fikri. Tthe national UMNO leaders who might have reselected him thus came to see him as a loose cannon. It was then-UMNO deputy president Abdul Razak Hussein who stepped in and unilaterally took control of the division to stop the fissure from developing further. Wan Yahya took this as a sign that UMNO no longer wanted him, and bolted. In 1969 he led the charge for PAS, contesting the Kemaman seat and a state seat, gleefully airing Terengganu UMNO’s dirty laundry including Ibrahim Fikri’s extensive land and mining holdings in Kemaman and a residence said to be bigger than the Sultan’s. He broke the Alliance stranglehold here by winning one of its state seats but Wan Mokhtar Ahmad, ever the good soldier, survived in the parliamentary seat by 894 votes.

Wan Mokhtar vacated Kemaman and dropped down to the state assembly in 1974 on UMNO’s orders, in preparation for cleaning up the state party’s house – Ibrahim Fikri’s problems had caused three successive menteris besar, beginning with himself, to resign. Wan Mokhtar would stay on as menteri besar as well as Kemaman head (once the division got its leadership privileges back) from his Chukai base all the way until the end of the millennium.

In the meantime two other developments occurred ahead of the 1974 election. PAS had joined the newly-formed Barisan Nasional the year before, and would have to be accommodated in seat allocations. Redelineation had also reduced Kemaman to its present-day boundaries to make room for new seats elsewhere, and in particular two seats were created in the northern Kuala Terengganu area: one went to PAS and one went to UMNO’s ex-menteri besar Nik Hassan Abdul Rahman, who was kicked upstairs to Parliament.

So a fresh berth was needed for the Kuala Terengganu Utara incumbent, UMNO stalwart Abdul Kadir Ismail. Another al-Azhar graduate, Abdul Kadir had lost in 1959 before winning in 1964, having been the head of the Special Section in the Information Department (read: chief of propaganda) in the meantime. He had also been UMNO information head, chair of its religious bureau, and deputy in the Prime Minister’s Department during the 1971-74 period, a critical time for UMNO’s propaganda and religious credentials; his primary contribution in this last office was helping establish and regulate the State Economic Development Corporation (SEDC). He came into 1974 fresh off efforts to solicit Japanese investment in local industries such as steel, particularly those in rural areas, and was moved to Kemaman that year. Funny how things work out.

In his new berth Abdul Kadir became Deputy Minister of Information under MIC president V. Manickavasagam, where he contributed to his state’s future embrace of mass media in politics: telephone connectivity on the East Coast was increased from 2,000 to 5,000 lines under his watch. He lived just long enough to see this happen. Abdul Kadir had always lived in Kuala Terengganu, celebrating a lavish wedding there in April 1960, but a month before the wedding he had been hospitalized for head injuries after his car overturned in Kemaman. In a grim echo of that incident he served less than two years as MP for Kemaman, dying in 1976.

The by-election to fill his seat returned future deputy minister of public enterprises Abdul Manan Othman, a state administrative official and general manager of the SEDC, by a substantially smaller margin. But it was still safe, so in 1978 when the Kuala Terengganu-based Abdul Manan decamped for a seat in his hometown, Kemaman continued to return his UMNO successor Ismail Mansor Said. In his new seat Abdul Manan became the first federal minister from Terengganu, though he lost his Agriculture ministry when Mahathir decided he was too close to rival Tengku Razaleigh – he did later join Razaleigh’s UMNO splinter Semangat 46 and won under its colors in 1990, losing in 1995.

Ismail Mansor had stronger roots in Kemaman as deputy chief of its UMNO division. In his four elections he put away veteran journalist and PAS candidate Subky Abdul Latif in 1982, and withstood the rise of S46 which sent a young man named Ahmad Shabery Cheek to battle him in 1990. He served quietly, chairing the influential Public Accounts Committee for a term (1985-90), serving as parliamentary secretary for the Minister of Youth and Sports for another (1990-95), and leading the bumiputera entrepeneurship agency MARA. Upon his exit from Parliament he jumped into the private sector as a board member of the sprawling Lion Group, which made it big in steel, and later a director of bumiputera-owned Kemaman construction company Ahmad Zaki Resources Bhd whose early clients included the SEDC and Kemaman Port.

In his place Kijal native Ramli Taib stepped into Parliament in 1995. Ramli was elected Kemaman UMNO Youth chief in 1998, reflecting how congested the hierarchy was: Wan Mokhtar was still division head, and the new deputy was Kijal assemblyman and state exco Ahmad Said who had won his seat in a 1990 by-election. In both of these elections the loser was a young man named Ahmad Shabery Cheek. Ahead of 1999, internal politicking sent Ramli dropping down to the Air Putih state seat while Wan Zaki Wan Muda, founder (and the Z) of Ahmad Zaki Resources Bhd, ran for the parliamentary seat.

But the hierarchy was about to be shaken up in a big way. In 1999 Anwar’s nascent KeADILan contested here with Abdul Rahman Yusof, an engineer who left the private sector to become the party’s founding Terengganu chairman and head of its Kemaman branch. Fuelled by reformasi and disenchantment with Wan Mokhtar’s quarter century in office, Abdul Rahman won Kemaman by four points to become PKR’s only MP in the state to date. UMNO lost all of Terengganu’s parliamentary seats along with the state government, including three of four state seats here: Ramli Taib lost, Ahmad Said lost, and Wan Mokhtar himself lost, the sole survivor being Kemasik assemblyman Abu Bakar Ali.

Wan Mokhtar retired from politics in 2000. Ahmad Said then couped his rival Abu Bakar for the Kemaman UMNO top post and brought Ahmad Shabery Cheek with him as second in command. For 2004 Ahmad Shabery was deputized to fight the marquee battle in Kemaman, which he won. Successive prime ministers seem to have liked him. He became parliamentary secretary in the Foreign Affairs Ministry in 2006. After 2008 Badawi put him in the cabinet as Minister of Communications and Multimedia, the successor to Information, a post he would also hold for two years under Najib; in between he was Youth and Sports Minister for Najib’s first term.

In the meantime Ahmad Said had recovered his own seat in 2004 and continued his multi-decade run of funneling projects into it, which have included the Giant, the Genting Group resort (both highlighted earlier), and the Kemaman Zoo – a frenetic pace that increased after he bounced into the menteri besar’s post in 2008. As this post is already quite long we shall omit his buffoonery in and out of that office.

In the 2015 reshuffle that saw Muhyiddin’s sacking, Ahmad Shabery was moved to helm the Agriculture Ministry, completing his speedrun of all his predecessors’ portfolios. There has been a certain showmanship in his tenure there, probably picked up from his Comms stint. Apart from the corn pilot project mentioned earlier he also joined the cause of his constituent Sabri Ali, who set a national record for longest solo walk (over 2,000 kilometres, across every state in Malaysia) to promote the “miracle food” of kelulut honey, joining a Guiness World Record for the world’s largest boat parade which his fisherman constituents set at Kuala Kemaman in 2014.

So consider the other record that was broken a few years later when BN was turfed out federally. More precisely, consider a record that was not broken: BN did not lose every parliamentary seat in Terengganu as it did in 1999, but it did lose Kemaman, with Ahmad Shabery falling to Kemaman PAS chair and religious school principal Che Alias Hamid. That may have indicated a formal passing of UMNO supremacy in this area.

PAS took control of Terengganu again in 2018 with aerospace engineer Ahmad Samsuri Mokhtar at the controls. As most of you know, PN swept its parliamentary seats last year and all 32 seats in the assembly in August, including in Kemaman where Che Alias – who became chairman of the Kemaman Port Authority under Muhyiddin’s administration – clotheslined Ahmad Said. But a voter took the result to court, arguing that PAS had bribed voters by distributing government aid via state programs during the campaign period, and in October the Elections Court threw out Che Alias’ win.

This was pretty much the rationale behind the Kuala Terengganu by-election earlier this year that PAS’s Ahmad Amzad Hashim won even more convincingly than before, and in the average voter’s eyes this by-election will be seen as a waste of time. Polling district data is unavailable but Che Alias won last year with 58.11%, and in August the PN state candidates collectively carried this constituency with 63.44%. Bersatu information chief Razali Idris has claimed that PAS won the Kijal state seat by over 2,000 votes in the 2022 result. Ahmad Said lost his seat to Razali in August by over 3,000 votes.

BN under Zahid Hamidi has been almost pathologically incapable of reflecting on its culpability for its own present problems. In that vein, the big man recently declared Kemaman to be BN’s “safe seat,” which may be true if read in light of the exhaustive history above but makes him look like a blithering idiot to anyone who has lived through the past five years. BN was assigned to contest here on that basis but of their leaders here both Ahmad Shabery and Ahmad Said have joined Anwar’s federal government trough, as chairmen of FELDA and Ketengah respectively, and did not seem inclined to repeat their 2018 and 2022 humiliations.

It is left as an exercise for the reader whether BN’s candidate choice is a masterstroke or an admission of its bankruptcy. The BN direct candidate is retired General Raja Mohamed Affandi Raja Mohamed Noor, former Chief of the Malaysian Defense Forces and Chief of the Army, who was born at the opposite end of the state in Besut but went to school here. BN bigwigs have trumpeted his contributions to Kemaman including his flood relief work here and the Limbong Bridge built during his Army Chief tenure. The general has received lots of fawning press coverage but has also played to his strengths as much as possible given the circumstances.

PAS considers this election a walkover, its vice-president Idris Ahmad even quipping that a mineral water bottle could win it for them with a larger majority. Again, it is left as an exercise for the reader whether their candidate choice is a masterstroke or an admission that they’re more scared than they let on: far from being water bottle-tier, it is none other than menteri besar Ahmad Samsuri Mokhtar, whose electoral base is in Hadi Awang’s fiefdom across the state. There’s nothing but upside for PAS if “Dr. Sam” gets into Parliament, as he is the kind of presentable figure the party desires to balance out the likes of Kedah menteri besar Sanusi Mohd Nor. Key leaders have even floated him as a prime ministerial candidate. Samsuri has been absent from the campaign trail and BN is alleging that he’s too busy with his menteri besar duties and will be an absent MP if elected. The voters who handed him a 32-0 state assembly are likely to take this as praise of Samsuri.

Regardless PAS has absolutely nothing to worry about, before or now. Their goal is an increased majority – and in the unthinkable event that they lose, they’ve amassed more than enough popular support to rival (if they so choose) a famous event connected to Kemaman. December 1950 saw the custody case of Maria Hertogh, a Dutch POW’s daughter who had integrated into Muslim life but whose parents were later awarded custody of her; her adopted home of Kemaman will go to the polls a few days removed from the 73rd anniversary of the riots that rocked Singapore in response to that decision – before UMNO, before PAS, when this was still a fishing village in a swampy disputed area. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

PN hold

[Joseph Cao]

Some errata that aren't strictly part of the post. Firstly, there is a map of the polling districts courtesy of Tindak Malaysia, which also shows you exactly how urbanized Chukai is compared to everywhere else and why this seat actually has a non-Malay population that isn't a rounding error:

Ismail Mansor had stronger roots in Kemaman as deputy chief of its UMNO division. In his four elections he put away veteran journalist and PAS candidate Subky Abdul Latif in 1982,

And a little aside about this guy. Subky’s outing in Kemaman was only the second contest of many: his first was the Port Klang by-election of 1979 to succeed the recently deceased V. Manickavasagam, who as mentioned served with fellow deceased MP Abdul Kadir Ismail of Kemaman in the Communications Ministry. After improving immensely on PAS’ traditional performance in the seat – coming within three hundred votes of beating DAP for second place – he wrote A Javanese Child of Port Klang: An Early Analysis of the By-Election. Certainly that rates a mention in a post about analyzing by-elections.

[Secretary of State Liberal Hack]

Thank you for these posts; My lack of knowlege regarding Malasiyan politics is shameful for me and it's hard to find good sources for it.

[jaichind]

Kemaman by-election

PN-PAS       70.1
BN-UMNO    29.9

back in 2022, it was

PN-PAS       58.1
BN-UMNO    34.1
PH-PKR         7.4

It seems the Chinese vote did not turn out which hit the BN-UMNO vote plus the expected defection of the old UMNO base to PAS or not voting due to the BN alliance with PH.  The only bright spot for BN-PH is the military postal vote seems to be shifting toward BN.  That vote is a proxy for the civil service (mostly Malay) vote which I expect to trend PH-BN next general election even as the overall Malay vote shift toward PN.

[Joseph Cao]

Kemaman by-election

PN-PAS       70.1
BN-UMNO    29.9

back in 2022, it was

PN-PAS       58.1
BN-UMNO    34.1
PH-PKR         7.4

It seems the Chinese vote did not turn out which hit the BN-UMNO vote plus the expected defection of the old UMNO base to PAS or not voting due to the BN alliance with PH.  The only bright spot for BN-PH is the military postal vote seems to be shifting toward BN.  That vote is a proxy for the civil service (mostly Malay) vote which I expect to trend PH-BN next general election even as the overall Malay vote shift toward PN.

I would probably not read too much into the trend in military postal votes (all 382 of them) when BN literally ran a retired general, and likewise for the overall vote when PAS literally ran the menteri besar who just wiped out all his opposition in August.

Hard to say which demographic did or didn't turn out when the Chinese areas tend to be won by PAS anyway – I don't think there are any polling stations here where PH+BN outpolled PAS even last year.

[Secretary of State Liberal Hack]

Kemaman by-election

PN-PAS       70.1
BN-UMNO    29.9

back in 2022, it was

PN-PAS       58.1
BN-UMNO    34.1
PH-PKR         7.4

It seems the Chinese vote did not turn out which hit the BN-UMNO vote plus the expected defection of the old UMNO base to PAS or not voting due to the BN alliance with PH.  The only bright spot for BN-PH is the military postal vote seems to be shifting toward BN.  That vote is a proxy for the civil service (mostly Malay) vote which I expect to trend PH-BN next general election even as the overall Malay vote shift toward PN.

I would probably not read too much into the trend in military postal votes (all 382 of them) when BN literally ran a retired general, and likewise for the overall vote when PAS literally ran the menteri besar who just wiped out all his opposition in August.

Hard to say which demographic did or didn't turn out when the Chinese areas tend to be won by PAS anyway – I don't think there are any polling stations here where PH+BN outpolled PAS even last year.

Is there any support for PAS anywhere among non-malay voters from parochial issues or some other reason ?

[Joseph Cao]

Is there any support for PAS anywhere among non-malay voters from parochial issues or some other reason ?

The perception, from videos of old Chinese men at Terengganu PAS rallies circulating online, is more inflated than it presumably actually is. But plenty of people see Ahmad Samsuri as a genuinely "different kind of PAS" because he came from aerospace instead of the traditional religious background.

Usually they also say he runs the state well. Menteri besar job approval ratings tend to be high regardless of state and run far ahead of the actual party breakdown, so take that in its context, but it has for sure been a smoother run of things than UMNO 2004-18 which was being destabilized all through by Ahmad Said among others.

[Joseph Cao]

Anyway, for the first time in four years there are no vacancies in any of the state assemblies or the Dewan Rakyat. Usually this doesn't go on longer than two years at a time because of election law, so you can thank the unprecedented political upheaval of the past few years for that. And COVID of course.

[Secretary of State Liberal Hack]

Is there any support for PAS anywhere among non-malay voters from parochial issues or some other reason ?

The perception, from videos of old Chinese men at Terengganu PAS rallies circulating online, is more inflated than it presumably actually is. But plenty of people see Ahmad Samsuri as a genuinely "different kind of PAS" because he came from aerospace instead of the traditional religious background.

Usually they also say he runs the state well. Menteri besar job approval ratings tend to be high regardless of state and run far ahead of the actual party breakdown, so take that in its context, but it has for sure been a smoother run of things than UMNO 2004-18 which was being destabilized all through by Ahmad Said among others.

I tried to search it up but couldn't find anything, does PAS have any Indian Muslim or chinese convert MP's or is their parlimentary delegation entirley malay ?

[Logical]

Is there any support for PAS anywhere among non-malay voters from parochial issues or some other reason ?

The perception, from videos of old Chinese men at Terengganu PAS rallies circulating online, is more inflated than it presumably actually is. But plenty of people see Ahmad Samsuri as a genuinely "different kind of PAS" because he came from aerospace instead of the traditional religious background.

Usually they also say he runs the state well. Menteri besar job approval ratings tend to be high regardless of state and run far ahead of the actual party breakdown, so take that in its context, but it has for sure been a smoother run of things than UMNO 2004-18 which was being destabilized all through by Ahmad Said among others.

I tried to search it up but couldn't find anything, does PAS have any Indian Muslim or chinese convert MP's or is their parlimentary delegation entirley malay ?

Non Malay PAS candidates aren't as rare as you think but they run in safe DAP seats so none of them gets elected.

[Joseph Cao]

Is there any support for PAS anywhere among non-malay voters from parochial issues or some other reason ?

The perception, from videos of old Chinese men at Terengganu PAS rallies circulating online, is more inflated than it presumably actually is. But plenty of people see Ahmad Samsuri as a genuinely "different kind of PAS" because he came from aerospace instead of the traditional religious background.

Usually they also say he runs the state well. Menteri besar job approval ratings tend to be high regardless of state and run far ahead of the actual party breakdown, so take that in its context, but it has for sure been a smoother run of things than UMNO 2004-18 which was being destabilized all through by Ahmad Said among others.

I tried to search it up but couldn't find anything, does PAS have any Indian Muslim or chinese convert MP's or is their parlimentary delegation entirley malay ?

The only non-Malay MPs from PN (PAS+Bersatu) are their two East Malaysians, Ronald Kiandee (Sabah Kadazandusun) and Ali Biju (Sarawak Dayak), both Christian and both of Bersatu.

At state level PAS itself had a Chinese convert assemblyman in Kelantan until August, that was Anuar Tan Abdullah in the Kota Bharu city center seat that PH picked up.