Sabah state election GRS is returned
More of the same in Sabah politics over the next five years
With a voter turnout of 64.35 percent, almost 2.0 percent lower than 2020, the Hajiji Noor led Gabungan Rakyat Sabah (GRS) was returned. Hajiji Noor was very quickly sworn in as chief minister in the early hours of Sunday morning by the governor Musa Aman before seat winners could has a chance deeply reflect upon the results.
GRS seats decreased from the 38 it held in the last Assembly, to 29 in the new state assembly. Its main competitor Warisan led by Shafie Apdal won 25 seats, two better than in
2020. Although Warisan held its strongholds on the east coast, defeated DAP and PKR in urban areas, the party was not strong enough to win the seats it needed to form a simple majority.
In the interior, Parti Solidarity Tanah Airku (STAR) (2 seats), UPKO (3 seats), and Parti Solidarity Demokratik (KDM) (1 seat) managed to win a few seats. Independents from within the Kadazan-Dusun Murut communities managed to win 5 seats in Bandau, Pintasan, Petegas, Tulid, and Kukusan.
According to reports, the five independents threw their support behand Hajiji’s GRS, along with 3 members of Upko, and one from PKR to give him a two-seat majority in the assembly.
UMNO could only manage to win 5 seats, losing 9 seats. Bersatu lost all of the 11 seats it gained during the 2020 election. The DAP has been completely wiped out, erasing decades of representation in Sabah. PKR was only able to hold Melalap with parachute candidate Jamawi Ja’afar, former UMNO youth chief and Warisan member. PKR was not able to hold on to the Api Api seat in the Kota Kinabalu area, which was won by Warisan. PAS was able to pick up its first seat in the Muslim dominated seat of Karambunai with a slim margin of 395 votes.
Significance for Sabah
What is most interesting about the Sabah state election is that Sabah based parties received 919,340 votes (80.00%), verses the peninsula-based parties which only received 117,522 votes or 10.23%. This is counting UMNO Sabah as a Sabah party, which received 144,389 votes. One could see that corruption issues had little influence on the overall result.
GRS small majority of only a couple of seats could lead to unstable government during this term. However, there are 6 nominated seats with full voting rights that GRS can use to strengthen their position in the assembly.
Another question is how much of a mandate did GRS really receive from Sabahans? Only 16 out of 73 seats in the election where actually won with more than 50 percent of the votes counted.
Significance for peninsula-based parties
It would be naïve to directly equate the results from Sabah to national politics, as local issues were involved. However, there are a few lessons that the national parties must consider coming into the national elections.
1. Bersatu has a leadership problem. The current leadership just didn’t work in the Sabah election.
2. UMNO still hasn’t recovered from its poor performance of 2022 in the last federal election. There is something missing within UMNO and this must be sorted out before Melaka, Johor, and the next federal election.
3. UMNO will have seen that Pakatan Harapan failed to capture the non-Malay vote. This is what UMNO needs and the current assumption of the UMNO-PH link-up must be reconsidered.
4. Both the DAP and PKR have lost a massive proportion of their respective support bases. If the DAP wants to win around 40 seats in the next general election it must drastically change its philosophy and action within the ‘Unity government’. The DAP is being singled out for the perceived failings of the federal government. Likewise, PKR could be crushed in the coming Melaka and Johor state elections and next general election if the party doesn’t heed the warnings from Sabah.
Bersatu, DAP and PKR should be deep in thought about their performances in Sabah and make some changes if they are going to be competitive. Meanwhile in Sabah on Monday its just business as usual again.
Sabah wont be following the footsteps of Sarawak and will still have a government based upon personality and patronage.
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The recent state election in Sabah has prompted a flurry of interpretations, many of them contradictory and most of them superficial. Yet the deeper pattern is neither new nor unique to Sabah. Electoral outcomes across Malaysia , whether in Johor, Selangor, Penang, Kedah, Kelantan or Perlis, have always been shaped less by grand ideological tides than by the cumulative impression left by individual candidates and the coalitions that back them. Local grievances, personal credibility, campaign discipline and the raw visibility of party machinery matter far more than any imported narrative about “reform” or “regime change.”
What is distinctive in the present cycle, however, is the growing public awareness of a phenomenon that has been quietly gathering force for two decades: the steady, almost capillary penetration of ethnic-Chinese political and economic influence into every sphere of Malaysian life, both at federal and state levels. This is not the crude “Chinese takeover” caricature peddled in certain quarters, but a measurable structural shift in demographic weight, capital concentration, educational attainment and, crucially, political articulation.
This shift did not occur in a vacuum. Since the early 2000s, a well-documented constellation of Western regime-change organizations, most prominently the Open Society Foundations and the National Endowment for Democracy, together with their local grantees and partners , invested hundreds of millions of dollars in building what was essentially a parallel political infrastructure in Malaysia. The objective was never genuine democratic flourishing; it was controlled destabilization followed by the installation of pliable administrations. The playbook is by now familiar: lavish funding for selected NGOs, media platforms, youth movements and opposition parties; the cultivation of a cadre of Western-educated returnees armed with fashionable slogans; and the relentless amplification of corruption and human-rights themes calibrated to erode the legitimacy of the incumbent government.
The results were mixed elsewhere in Southeast Asia, spectacularly successful in some cases (Thailand’s endless cycle of coups and colour-coded mobilizations) and partial in others. In Malaysia, the strategy achieved its most conspicuous triumph in 2018. A coalition animated by little more than anti-Mahathir and anti-Najib sentiment — and bankrolled in no small part by the same external networks , swept to federal power. Figures such as Lim Kit Siang and Lim Guan Eng, Teresa Kok, Hannah Yeoh, Elizabeth Wong (all backed up by a foreign based Regime Change academic James Chin at the University of Tasmania) and Waytha Moorthy, together with a cohort of UMNO defectors who discovered overnight principles, became the public face of a government whose real architects remained discreetly in the background.
Today that government, led by Anwar Ibrahim, finds itself in an ironic position. Its original sponsors in Washington are themselves consumed by domestic political turmoil and can no longer be relied upon for the lavish subventions of the past. Many of the 2018 coalition’s most vocal champions have either retreated into silence or are openly disillusioned. The UMNO renegades who expected generous rewards for their defection circle an increasingly preoccupied prime minister, searching for crumbs in a banquet that never materialized.
Meanwhile, the core issue that external regime-change doctrines were always designed to obscure, namely, the legitimate anxieties of the Malay-Muslim majority confronted with rapid socio-economic displacement , has not disappeared; it has merely been driven underground, only to resurface in the ballot box in forms that surprise the cosmopolitan commentariat.
Corruption, properly understood, is moral turpitude: the betrayal of public trust for private gain. It is not the existence of affirmative-action policies, nor the inevitable frictions of a multi-ethnic polity striving to correct historical imbalances. Confusing the two has been the most enduring success of the regime-change industry: it has persuaded a generation of young Malaysians that the defence of their own community’s interests is inherently corrupt, while presenting the dismantling of those interests as the highest form of virtue.
Sabah’s election results, like those in the peninsula, are therefore not an aberration. They are a delayed but entirely predictable reaction to twenty years of engineered polarization, broken promises and the slow realization that the glittering prizes of “liberal democracy” dangled before an angry electorate turned out to be fool’s gold.
The country now faces a moment of reckoning. The old formulas, whether the Barisan Nasional developmentalism of the Mahathir-Najib era or the Anwar coalition’s uneasy marriage of progressive rhetoric and communal horse-trading, have exhausted their credibility. What is required is not another imported revolution, but a sober, Malaysian-led reinvention of the social contract: one that acknowledges the reality of ethnic-Chinese pre-eminence in certain domains without denying the equally real anxieties of the Malay-Bumiputera majority; one that insists on transparency and accountability without making them pretexts for perpetual destabilization; and one that finally frees Malaysian politics from the puppet strings of distant foundations and their local proxies.
Only when that reinvention begins in earnest will elections in Sabah or anywhere else cease to be interpreted as mysterious upheavals and return to being what they ought to be: the orderly expression of a nation arguing with itself about its future, rather than a nation being argued over by others.
The Chinese in Malaysia as in South East Asia and elsewhere can no longer expect to be tolerated as a nation within a nation bribing their way into every domain at the expense of other using the power of money and seduction of every material kind. And the non Chinese will have to learn that in order to achieve that they themselves will have to avoid and resist the temptations of easy cheap material gains for their own salvation.