By: Wong Chin HuatMalaysia’s Anwar Ibrahim could be forced to call for an early general election by year-end despite holding 151 seats, a 68 percent super-majority, in the 222-seat parliament if the Barisan Nasional, the second-largest partner of his Madani Coalition with 30 seats, wins two key state elections with a clandestine pact with its Islamist archrival, PAS.Landslides in the state polls of Johor (July 11) and Negeri Sembilan (August 1) may embolden Barisan’s anchor party, the United Malays National Organization (UMNO), to pull out and force Anwar’s hand.Johor is UMNO’s birthplace, the strongest among the four states in which the party, once Malaysia’s most powerful political party, still holds power following the 2022 national election. Johor is the only state that refused to reciprocate power-sharing with Anwar’s coalition, Pakatan Harapan.More powerful than UMNO are the Sultan, Sultan Ibrahim, currently Malaysia’s King, and his Crown Prince Tunku Ismail, currently the state’s regent. The father is among Malaysia’s richest men. In the last state election in March 2022, with a low 55 percent turnout, UMNO won 43 percent of the votes and 71 percent of the seats with the popular incumbent Chief Minister Hasni Mohammad as the poster boy. However, Sultan Ibrahim picked a younger politician, Onn Hafiz, as the new chief minister just to make the point that the chief minister is picked by the monarch, not the ruling party. Days before the nomination, the Crown Prince rejected Anwar Ibrahim’s claim that the wealthy state has suffered significant leakages. He accused the Federal Government of draining the state and demanded that 25-30 percent - not just 5-7.5 percent currently - of the federal revenue collected in the state should be returned to the state government. Dissolving the assembly 10 months before his full term, Onn Hafiz made clear that Barisan would contest all 56 state seats, leaving no room for cooperation with Pakatan. Such a strategic choice made perfect sense: UMNO voters want the party to lead instead of playing second fiddle in a gigantic pact with Pakatan Harapan. UMNO’s non-Malay partners want to challenge Anwar’s coalition in its Chinese-majority and ethnically mixed strongholds. In reciprocity, on June 5, Pakatan Harapan dissolved the state legislature in Negeri Sembilan, where an intriguing royal feud has the sitting ruler Tuanku Mukhriz and his four elector chiefs trying to unseat each other. UMNO seized the opportunity to attack the pro-Mukhriz Pakatan Harapan chief minister and pulled out as the junior partner of the state government. The dissolution ended a truce that temporarily kept the Pakatan Harapan minority government in office. Two days later, Oon Hafiz made a gung-ho vow that he would rather not be the chief minister than to “sit on the same table with the Democratic Action Party (DAP)”, the Chinese-dominant, largest component party in Anwar’s coalition. The DAP has long been a punching bag in Malay-Muslim nationalist politics for being assertive on liberal values, minority rights, and reform. However, UMNO and DAP have been sharing power for 43 months in Anwar’s coalition government, and many ministers on both sides have been working respectfully with each other. Onn Hafiz’s grandstanding was initially puzzling because the Barisan is poised to win a majority and does not need to form a coalition government with Pakatan. Both ethnic relations and inter-party relations between the two have been largely cordial in Johor, not least because the assertive palace actively promotes a mini-nation narrative of Bangsa Johor (the Johor Nation). However, it soon became clear that Johor may be a testbed for quietly reviving Muafakat Nasional, a short-lived opposition pact between UMNO and PAS after Pakatan unseated Barisan in 2020. Both parties became part of the new federal government when another UMNO splinter, Bersatu, left and collapsed the first PH government in what became known as the Sheraton Putsch in 2020. However, that soon also ended Muafakat as PAS joined Bersatu to form a new coalition, Perikatan Nasional. However, Bersatu has split after being in opposition for three years, and PAS sided with Bersatu’s new splinter over the remnant party. Now that PAS has ditched the Bersatu remnant, the obstacle to UMNO-PAS rapprochement disappears. PAS unsuccessfully negotiated for PAS and its allies to contest some seats under the Barisan’s logo. Failure in seat allocation forced PAS to resume the Perikatan brand with Bersatu as the estranged partner, contesting only 33 seats in total. Nevertheless, PAS issued clear instructions to its base: first, support the Barisan in 23 constituencies which PN stayed out of; second, no support for Bersatu for 16 seats it contests. This basically reduces a tripartite battle in 2022 to primarily a straight fight between BN-PAS and PH, with insignificant friendly matches between BN and PAS and allies. For UMNO and PAS, the goal is to eliminate Bersatu, whose president and former Prime Minister Muhyiddin Yassin hails from Johor, and to shrink PH’s presence. Political scientist and former DAP parliamentarian Ong Kian Meng’s likeliest scenario is a landslide of BN’s 53 seats while PH’s seats would plummet from 10 to mere three. If this formula works out, then UMNO and PAS would take it to Negeri Sembilan and the general election. There is no trust between UMNO and PAS, just as there was none in Muafakat then, but this is not an obstacle for their marriage of convenience. They can fight later after winning together a parliamentary majority by dividing up the Malay-majority seats.There are caveats, however. First, can PAS carry Perikatan votes to Barisan? Would they stay back or even vote for Pakatan? As part of the federal Government, Pakatan and Barisan tried pooling votes in six state elections in 2023, but it backfired. Where UMNO was not on the ballot, many voters turned to Perikatan instead of Pakatan. Second, there might be signs of a Malay backlash against the royal overreach, but the size is hard to estimate. The outgoing legislative speaker has quit UMNO in protest and declared his support for Pakatan. Third, the Malay unity game is a double-edged sword that may also rally the lethargic minority and liberal votes to Pakatan or its reformist splinter Bersama. An enthusiastic turnout by Pakatan’s base may reverse Barisan’s luck. Eight months after BN’s low turn-out landslide, the federal election in November 2022 registered a 20 percent surge in turnout, and BN’s vote share plummeted by 12 percent. If the state election had been held then, BN would have lost 38 percent in state seats.Wong Chin Huat is a political science professor at Sunway University, Malaysia