PAS’s decades of hard work paid off with the Green Wave in Malaysia’s GE15

Abstract

The result of Malaysia’s 15th General Election (GE15) defied the popular pre-election prediction that young voters would vote for progressive parties driven by youthful ideals and that the Malay-based parties vying for the same voter base would struggle to gain traction. Thanks to the implementation of two electoral reforms, the Automatic Voter Registration (AVR), and the lowering of voting age from 21 to 18 (Undi18), young voters constituted the bulk of six million new voters since 2018. While the Malays’ voting patterns were indeed more diverse than those of other groups, the sentiment against the Chinese-dominant Democratic Action Party (DAP), whose image has been smeared as anti-Malays and anti-Islam, was prevalent and appeared to be a unifying factor. The assumption that new young voters would vote for the multiethnic Alliance of Hope (Pakatan Harapan, PH) was a myth. The PanMalaysian Islamic Party (PAS) and its coalition National Alliance (Perikatan Nasional, PN) had almost a clean sweep in five Northern and East Coast states of the Peninsula. Ethno-religious campaigning is nothing new, but it increased significantly after the last election in 2018. More Malay-based parties vying for the Peninsular Malay votes – exceeding 50% of the electorate, whose weight was further amplified by malapportionment and gerrymandering of electoral constituencies – meant that each party tried to out-do the other in their Malay-ness. However, when it came to protecting Malays and Islam, PAS had a head start, especially during a time when the Malays had lost their trust in the United Malays National Organisation (UMNO) and did not trust that other Malay-based parties could address the DAP threat. PAS has a clear and consistent faithbased ideology, which in recent years has been intertwined with Malay identity and ethnonationalism. As the constitutional definition of Malay is tied to Islam, PAS easily equated protecting Islam with protecting Malay rights and positioned itself as the logical alternative to UMNO. Both Undi18 and AVR were implemented in December 2021 without any programme of democratic education, which is necessary to nurture a democratic culture. Based on IMAN Research’s sentiment analysis on the GE15, many youths, while being excited to vote, were in general unfamiliar regarding key concepts of democracy, human rights, the Constitution and the rights of minorities etc. In this situation, the immediate understanding on democracy would only be from family members and social media. Social media played a significant role in the campaign for this election, partly because the Covid-19 pandemic had earlier limited public gatherings due to social