Seven Key State Constituencies of Terengganu’s Politics (1999-2018)

Abstract

Since the 1959’s first general election post-independence, UMNO-BN was the only political party coalition that dominated the federal government. In consequence to that, prior to the general election in 1999, UMNO-BN’s wins in the federal and in almost every state election was but guaranteed. Predicting the winners were a clear-cut and straight forward feat. Notwithstanding Malaysia’s democratic system, where every voter is free to vote for any political party of choice or to experiment with different political party in any election, the cumulative votes for political party other than UMNO-BN had hitherto failed to shake off the coalition’s near-perfect grip of national politics. It was only after the political transformation of the 1990’s began to take foothold of the country did UMNO-BN find its four decades domination beginning to grow weaker. This study analysed the variable voting patterns in the last five elections of Terengganu in 1999, 2004, 2008, 2013 and 2018. It studied the intense rivalry between two major Malay-Muslim based political parties of UMNO-BN and PAS. Based on the result of the tenth general election, both UMNO-BN and PAS can no longer be assured of a comprehensive win in the state. In other words, since 1999 onward, both has enjoyed equal chances of winning the state election. In addition to that, the election results of the state from 1999 to 2018 also indicated that any political party that won the state’s key seven constituencies would most likely form the state government as well, on top of it winning own strongholds nonetheless. 

Keywords: Key state constituencies, UMNO-BN, PAS, Election