Negeri Sembilan voted on Aug 1, Barisan Nasional and Perikatan Nasional divided the state between them before nomination day. Barisan took 25 of the 36 seats, Perikatan 11. Neither stood against the other anywhere.
Barisan Nasional is Umno and its partners. Perikatan Nasional is PAS and Bersatu, and the two big Malay parties have spent 30 years taking seats off each other.
The arrangement worked, and it proved almost nothing. Perikatan stood down in seats it had no chance of winning, on ground Barisan has held for years. Only in the north would the deal cost anything, and nobody has tested it there.
Why nobody has settled who leads
The two sides could not agree what they had agreed. Hadi Awang leads PAS, and in July he said the shape of it was agreed. Barisan would keep the 14 seats it held in the state, PAS the three it had won.
Ahmad Zahid Hamidi runs Umno. He denied there was any seat-sharing deal at all, and warned his own side that PAS positions could shift with events.
In the end the split was neither 14 and three nor anything either man had described. It was 25 and 11.
In the south, standing back costs PAS very little. It won three seats in Negeri Sembilan in 2023. In Johor in July, Perikatan left 23 of 56 seats empty and won none of the rest.
The north is different. PAS runs Kelantan, Terengganu and Kedah.
The youth want it most and pay for it least
Umno Youth chief Akmal Saleh has been the loudest voice for the two parties joining up. At a joint rally in Senawang the night before the vote, he set out an order: unite the two biggest Malay parties, and the rest will follow.
That restates the problem rather than solving it. Which two are biggest, and which of them leads, is what the men above him cannot agree on.
He has been as clear about what he will not do. By his own account he could take the Jasin parliamentary seat by working with DAP, and refuses, even though PAS holds it. He calls his aim penyatuan ummah, the uniting of the Muslim community.
The youth can talk this way because they carry none of the costs their leaders are arguing over. Sharing a stage is the easy part. What they control is the machinery that wins a seat. The crews who run the political talks known as ceramah. The WhatsApp groups. The lists for getting voters to the polls. Two sides can agree not to compete and still run two operations in the same seat.
In 2023 Perikatan won 43 of Kelantan’s 45 seats and all 32 in Terengganu, the first clean sweep there since 1978. Barisan lost all ten Terengganu seats it had held in 2018. Across the six states that voted that year, Umno contested 108 seats and won 19.
Apply the Negeri Sembilan rule in the north and it is Umno that stands aside, in states where it currently holds almost nothing. PAS can give up the south because it never had it. Umno is being asked to treat its worst year as permanent.
The youth want it most and pay for it least
Umno Youth chief Akmal Saleh has been the loudest voice for the two joining up. Unite the two biggest Malay parties, he says, and the rest will follow.
That restates the problem rather than solving it. The men above him cannot agree which two are biggest, or which of them leads.
Sharing a stage is the easy part. Party machines win seats. The ceramah crews who run the night rallies, the WhatsApp groups, the lists of who still needs a lift to the polling station. Two sides can agree not to compete and still run two operations in the same seat.
At the bottom the question is already settled
For supporters at the rallies, unity was mostly about making the choice simpler. Two Malay parties in one seat share the same voters and both lose. With one candidate to back, that worry goes away.
DAP is the party most Chinese voters back. What holds the deal together is opposition to it, and to a government that people at the rallies say DAP runs.
Malaysia’s government is led by Anwar Ibrahim of PKR. DAP has ministers in his cabinet. Anwar is not from DAP, and neither are his two deputies. That is still how those voters describe the government, and the description has lasted better than anything said in favour of the deal.
On the day, the ballot paper did not match the arrangement. PAS and Bersatu had been partners since 2020. PAS cut ties in June, and Bersatu contested 24 of the 36 seats under its own banner, losing everyone. Most voters still found more than one Malay name in front of them.
What Negeri Sembilan tested
Barisan stood aside in 11 seats. Three of them were seats PAS already held, and those were the real test. Umno voters there had only a Perikatan candidate. Whether they would follow had never been tested.
It worked. In Serting, PAS held the seat by 843 votes in 2023 and won this time by 12,115.
Negeri Sembilan is Barisan ground, and neither side gave up anything it wanted.
The north is the hard part, where it would be Umno standing aside in states it has already lost. Nobody has put that to it.
