Who decides the next government? The answer usually comes back the same: Sabah and Sarawak. The Malay vote is split three ways, so the Borneo states name their price and someone pays it. Since November 2022 that idea has hardened into common sense.
The reading is fair as far as it goes. What it misses is that the power is borrowed. The peninsula still holds 165 of the 222 seats in the Dewan Rakyat, and 112 of those are enough to form a government.
Three things are worth understanding: how the peninsula lost its majority, what Johor and Negeri Sembilan proved, and what would need to hold for it to happen again.
How the peninsula lost its majority
The split did it. At the 2022 general election Perikatan Nasional won 74 seats and Barisan Nasional 30, while Pakatan Harapan took 82. No side reached 112. Put the two Malay-led blocs together and they reach 104, eight seats short. That was Perikatan at its strongest.
The gap is where the Borneo states came in. Gabungan Parti Sarawak, the bloc that runs Sarawak, arrived with 23 seats and Gabungan Rakyat Sabah with six. The government was built around them, and the price has been paid in oil, gas and revenue talks ever since.
The peninsula still holds 165 seats
The peninsula holds 165 of those 222 seats. Sabah, Sarawak and Labuan hold 57 between them. A bloc that wins 112 seats in the peninsula alone forms a government without making a single call to Kuching. Borneo did not grow more powerful in 2022. The peninsula stopped agreeing with itself.
What Johor and Negeri Sembilan showed
Johor came first. On July 11, 2026 Barisan Nasional won 48 of the state’s 56 seats, up from 40 in 2022. Umno took 36 of the 37 it stood in. Perikatan Nasional won nothing. PAS lost all 11 seats it contested and Bersatu all 16, with 10 Bersatu candidates losing their deposits.
Negeri Sembilan showed the method more plainly. On Aug 1 Barisan and Perikatan agreed not to stand against each other. Barisan contested 25 seats and Perikatan the remaining 11, and each side told its supporters to vote for the other wherever it had no candidate. Between them they won 25 of the 36 seats, or 69%.
That share matters beyond Seremban. A bloc needs 112 of the peninsula’s 165 seats to govern, which works out to 68%. Negeri Sembilan cleared that bar by a point and a half, on a ballot where the Malay parties had stopped standing against each other. One state of 36 seats is not the peninsula, and the same swing would have to hold in places that vote nothing like Negeri Sembilan.
Borneo is not one bloc
Those 57 Borneo seats work as one force only if the parties holding them act as one. Sabah’s election in November 2025 showed how far off that is. Gabungan Rakyat Sabah, the coalition running the state, won 29 of 73 seats and Warisan 25. Nobody reached a majority, and five independents ended up deciding who governed.
Sarawak is the opposite. Gabungan Parti Sarawak faces no serious rival at home and won 23 federal seats in 2022.
Peninsular parties cannot solve their problem by winning in Borneo either. Barisan, Pakatan and Perikatan took eight of Sabah’s 73 seats between them. Whatever the peninsula wants back, it has to win at home.
Why the wins look weaker up close
Johor flatters the case. Perikatan Nasional did not contest 23 of the 56 seats, so Barisan won many of them against a thin field. Johor is also Umno’s strongest state. Its economy grew 8% last year, and a survey by Singapore’s S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, taken a month before polling, put menteri besar Onn Hafiz Ghazi’s approval at 80%. Voters had reasons to back Barisan that had nothing to do with Malay unity.
Negeri Sembilan had its own story. Barisan pulled its support in June over the menteri besar’s handling of a dispute about the state ruler’s position, and Pakatan went to the polls as a collapsed government.
The pact is the weak link. Barisan and Perikatan are opponents in Parliament. Ahmad Zahid Hamidi said in May 2026 that Barisan would contest the general election alone. And Bersatu, which stood alone in both states and won nothing, is now building a rival bloc.
None of this is a forecast. Whether the pact holds through a general election is a different question from whether the numbers allow it.
