The transformation in Malaysian politics that started with the March 8 general elections left the opposition with control over five states in the north, and robbed the ruling Barisan Nasional (BN) of its traditional 2/3 majority in parliament.

Three patterns were made manifest in the process. First, the greatest changes occurred at the state level; second, a geographical divide became undeniable; and third, all the allies of the dominant United Malays National Organisation (Umno) on the northern half of the peninsula suffered much greater relative losses than that party did at the state level.

But with Anwar Ibrahim, the opposition leader, trying so hard to topple the central government over the last few months, and with two by-elections won by the opposition being parliamentary – and not state – affairs, the real dimensions at which political transformation was taking place was forgotten.

The country’s focus became fixed, firstly on Anwar’s Pakatan Rakyat (PR) trying to transcend the 50% limit in parliament, and secondly on whether PR can win the Sarawak state elections due by 2011.

What the electoral success of the disparate parties within the PR strongly suggested was that different states were favouring different parties to represent them. This is a clear reflection and recognition of the cultural and geographical diversity of the country.

One main reason why Malaysia had failed in homogenising its population along lines of education, culture and language was because this diversity was badly underestimated. In the early years, the central government, under security threats from Indonesia and the Philippines, as well as domestic communists, grew much stronger in all ways than the original federalist format of the country had proposed.

The March 8 electoral results amounted to a bold attempt from below, starting in the northern parts of the peninsula, at loosening federal authoritarianism, and in curbing its many excesses.

In the five PR states taken as a whole, the Malaysian Chinese Association lost 87% of its representation; the Parti Gerakan Rakyat Malaysia lost 84% and the Malaysian Indian Congress ended up with no representation at all after losing all its four state seats. Umno did surprisingly well, relatively speaking, losing no more than 39% of its state seats.
The BN as a whole thus retreated by 57% in the northern states, excepting Perlis.

The five states, in this context, bear studying individually. We see that the BN holds only 20 of 56 seats in Selangor. More significantly, Umno’s allies hold only two such seats there, down from 19 in 2004. These hold none of the 55 state seats in Kelantan (with Umno holding 6), none of the 40 in Penang (with Umno holding 11), control two of 36 in Kedah (with Umno holding 12), and one of 59 in Perak (with Umno holding 28 before the crossovers earlier this week).

What these figures show are, firstly, that Umno’s allies have become shockingly irrelevant in the north, and, secondly, that the frontlines of the continuous battle between the BN (read Umno in this case) and the PR cut through Kedah where the PR has a six-seat majority, Negri Sembilan in the south where the BN control has an equally narrow advantage, and most dramatically, through Perak, where the BN now claims to have realised enough crossovers to fell the PR government under Mentri Besar Nizar Jamaluddin.

Besides these fault lines on the peninsula, one must also consider the volatile situation in the East Malaysian states of Sabah and Sarawak, where sounds of discontent grow louder by the day. Not only will the BN’s hold on power be seriously challenged there, but with the diverse ethnic quality of these states becoming more and more relevant, the definite ethnic categorisations so vital to BN politics risk being undermined.

In Perak, the situation will continue to be unstable for a while since that state, as far as the electoral results are concerned, is the major frontline for the battle between the old and the new. This battle goes beyond a simple choice between two coalitions, and is in reality part of the historical process of federal devolution that the diversity of the various parts of the country requires in the long run.

The larger picture – given how the BN structure has lost relevance in the north – is that although the fortunes of war may sway now one way, then the other, the demand for a better representation of the country’s diversity will continue to be raised.