BN and PH share a cabinet in Putrajaya. In Johor, they are fighting each other in all 56 seats, and the result may decide when Anwar calls the next general election.
By TENGKU NOOR SHAMSIAH TENGKU ABDULLAH
JOHOR BAHRU, June 29 – The shape of Johor’s 16th state election was effectively settled within an hour on Saturday morning. When nomination closed at 10am, the central fact of this contest was confirmed: Barisan Nasional and Pakatan Harapan, partners in Prime Minister Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim’s federal unity government, will contest all 56 seats against each other. In effect, the government in Putrajaya is running against itself in Johor.
That single decision defines almost every major political storyline of this election. Some 172 candidates from more than a dozen parties, plus six independents, were cleared, producing 14 straight fights, 27 three-cornered contests, 12 four-cornered battles and three five-way races. The Election Commission rejected no applications statewide. A total of 2.72 million voters are eligible, with early voting on 7 July and polling on 11 July. Twenty-nine seats are needed to form the government.
The incumbent: BN goes in heavy, and personal
BN enters the election defending the supermajority it won in 2022, when it took 40 of 56 seats. It has fielded a full slate: Umno in 37 seats, MCA in 15 and MIC in four.
The campaign’s centre of gravity is its own caretaker Menteri Besar. Onn Hafiz Ghazi, who is also Johor BN chairman, defends Machap in a straight fight against Amanah’s Nor Hafiz Roslan. Machap is about 66% Malay, and Onn Hafiz took roughly 57% of the vote there in 2022, winning by a 6,543 majority in a four-cornered race. A straight fight changes that arithmetic, and BN clearly wants its standard-bearer returned with an unambiguous mandate. The party signalled as much by surrounding him at nomination: Umno president Ahmad Zahid Hamidi, Hishammuddin Hussein, former MB Hasni Mohammad and Khairy Jamaluddin were all in attendance.
Yet the show of unity masked real strain, which surfaced sharply in the days before nomination and which weighs on Dr Oh’s reading below.
The partner-turned-rival: PH bets on Maszlee
PH has also gone state-wide, with PKR contesting 20 seats, Amanah 19 and DAP 17. Its strategic statement is in Tebrau. Former education minister Maszlee Malik contests Puteri Wangsa under the PH banner and is widely regarded as the coalition’s prospective Menteri Besar should it wrest control of the state. He walked in flanked by PH election director and Selangor MB Amirudin Shari and PH secretary-general Saifuddin Nasution Ismail.
It is also one of PH’s highest-risk strategic bets. Puteri Wangsa is one of three five-cornered fights, with Maszlee facing BN-MCA’s Teo Chia Ling, Muda’s Rashifa Aljunied, Bersama’s Nicholas Paul Vincent and an independent. A prospective MB in a crowded field is a calculated gamble: a clean win is a launchpad, but a split opposition vote here cuts directly against PH’s leadership narrative.
The opposition: PN plays selectively
Perikatan Nasional has not matched the two big coalitions for breadth, contesting only 33 seats: Bersatu in 16, PAS in 11, MIPP in five and Pejuang in one. Gerakan opted out entirely after a dispute over seat allocations within the coalition. The restraint is telling. PN is concentrating fire on terrain it can realistically hold or flip rather than mounting a full-state challenge it cannot resource. Its most-watched defence is Bukit Kepong, where Johor Bersatu chief and former MB Sahruddin Jamal stands in a stronghold seat.
The wildcards: Bersama’s debut and Muda’s retreat
The most interesting new variable is Bersama. Led by former cabinet ministers Rafizi Ramli and Nik Nazmi Nik Ahmad, the party is making its electoral debut in 15 constituencies, concentrated in southern Johor, an area viewed as politically progressive with a sizeable swing-voter bloc. It has rejected coalition talks and is treating Johor as preparation for the next general election. Crucially, eight of its target seats are Umno-held and five are DAP-held, so its vote-splitting potential runs in both directions, but its sharpest threat is to PH’s urban non-Malay base rather than to BN.
Muda, by contrast, is in retreat. It is contesting just four seats, and party president Amira Aisya Abdul Aziz, the Puteri Wangsa incumbent, has chosen not to defend, with the party fielding Rashifa Aljunied instead. A party that made history there in 2022 iseffectively stepping aside in its signature constituency in favour of a new contest.
The seats that will decide it
Three contests are worth fixing on. Yong Peng is a straight fight between Johor MCA chairman Ling Tian Soon and DAP newcomer Yong Hui Yi; with non-Malay voters at about 65%, it is the clearest barometer of whether non-Malay support has shifted since 2022. Bukit Batu is a five-way fight where PKR’s Arthur Chong defends a seat he won by just 137 votes, against BN, Bersama, Muda and an independent. And the broader battleground sits in the marginals: 12 of the multi-corner seats were decided by less than 10% in 2022, while 21 constituencies that changed hands in 2022, sitting on the border between BN’s rural heartland and PH’s urban bases, are again shaping up to decide the government.
What to expect
Three things to track through the 14-day campaign.
First, turnout is the hidden contest. In 2022, urban turnout collapsed, with Perling recording the state’s lowest at 42.2% and Skudai and Puteri Wangsa falling more than 30 points, partly on Omicron disruption and political fatigue. Whoever re-mobilises the urban, non-Malay and younger voters who stayed home last time gains the most, and that asymmetrically favours PH and Bersama if it materialises.
Second, the multi-corner maths favours the incumbent. With PN, Bersama, Muda and independents fragmenting the anti-BN vote across most battlegrounds, BN can win pluralities without majorities. The 14 straight fights are the exception that proves the rule, and they are where PH’s ceiling will be tested.
Third, and the reason national observers are watching closely: analysts cast the vote as a measure of how much of Johor’s industrial belt the two governing partners can still hold, and whether the opposition retains any real foothold there. Anwar himself has acknowledged that an early general election has crossed his mind, which makes Johor less a state contest than early indicator for the next federal campaign.
The analyst’s view
With nomination day confirming a state-wide clash between federal partners and a crowded field of spoilers, the central question is no longer who is contesting but what the result will mean. TNS News put that to Dr Oh Ei Sun, one of the country’s most widely cited political analysts, for a reading of how the 11 July contest is likely to unfold and what it signals beyond Johor.
Dr Oh is unsentimental about the supposed novelty of allies fighting allies. “The unity government was named as such in name only, I think, from the very beginning,” he said. “It has been a coalition government in essence, just like the previous coalition between PN and BN, when they also contested against one another. This is not something new. It is a repetition of what took place in 2022.”
He sees little prospect of that changing before the next federal contest. “Nobody is seriously thinking about BN and PH presenting a united front to go into the next general election. At best they could coordinate so that they avoid facing off against each other in some constituencies, but as we see in Johor, even that is a tall order.” The logic of the contest, he argued, is therefore purely accumulative: “The important thing now is for each coalition, and indeed each political party, to win as many seats as possible, so that based on the numbers they will have the political chips at the negotiation table to form the state government.”
On the likely outcome, Dr Oh expects continuity at the top but flags strain beneath it. “Nobody is seriously doubting that BN will return as the state government, or at least the largest component of it,” he said. “But it also faces challenges, especially internal power struggles. It seems like Umno Johor and Umno Central are not on good terms.” Those tensions broke into the open in the run-up to nomination, when Umno Supreme Council member and Rengit incumbent Datuk Dr Mohd Puad Zarkashi quit the party, alleging Johor Umno had lost autonomy and was overly influenced by the palace, a claim Onn Hafiz rejected as inaccurate and misleading.
He was equally even-handed about the opposition’s vulnerabilities. Of PH, he noted the threat from its own flank: “PH has this splinter party, Bersama, competing with it. Even though it has federal incumbent advantage, its public perception and popularity might have slipped over the last few years.” Of PN, he pointed to comparable fractures: “I am still talking about the green wave, but you also see PAS and Bersatu getting at one another, and Bersatu even has its own splinter party, namely Wawasan.”
From this he draws a common yardstick for all three coalitions. “The baseline for each coalition would be to retain the number of seats they won in the last state election. Anything else is a bonus. If they win fewer than last time, that is not a good omen for them going into the federal election.”
Dr Oh’s sharpest departure from the prevailing read concerns Maszlee Malik. Where much of the coverage casts the former education minister as PH’s Menteri Besar-in-waiting, he is blunt that the arithmetic does not support it. “PH Johor needs a leading figure, and apparently they are putting up Maszlee,” he said, noting that Maszlee had landed in a heavily contested seat. “He happens to choose Puteri Wangsa, which has a lot of competition. Let’s see whether he can do the magic there.” But he dismissed the leadership framing outright: “Nobody is seriously thinking about him being MB, because his party simply cannot win that many seats.”
On the spoilers, he is clear about the direction of the damage. “Bersama would hurt PH more. It is going to divert PH’s votes and thereby benefit BN,” he said, casting the new party’s debut as a dress rehearsal. “This Johor state election will be a precursor to see the impact Bersama could make in the next general election.”
That, ultimately, is why he sees Johor as a national signal rather than a state affair. The result, in his reading, will set the timing of Anwar Ibrahim’s next move. “If PH performs much better than the last round, Anwar will be very confident to call a snap general election,” he said. “If PH performs much worse than last time, then perhaps he would wait till the very end.”
Dr Oh Ei Sun is a senior fellow at the Singapore Institute of International Affairs and principal adviser at the Pacific Research Center of Malaysia.
“The unity government was named as such in name only, from the very beginning.” — Dr Oh Ei Sun
“Nobody is seriously thinking about him being MB, because his party simply cannot win that many seats.” — Dr Oh Ei Sun
- TNS NEWS