PAKATAN Harapan will lose 29 seats in the peninsula as a result of the Barisan Nasional-PAS partnership, if there’s a general election now, said a PKR-linked think-tank.

“The BN-PAS pact will win 97 parliamentary seats in Peninsular Malaysia, based on our latest 2019 Survey Malaysia: Mood of the Nation sentiments,” Institut Darul Ehsan (IDE) told PKR lawmakers during their retreat in Port Dickson from July 19-21.

Using the results from its latest survey, IDE said PH would only win 68 out of 166 federal seats in the peninsula.

By comparison, in the last election, four-party PH managed to win 97 out of those 166 seats. Coupled with defections and its pact with Warisan, the coalition currently has 138 MPs compared with the opposition’s 84.

Under the opposition pact, BN has the highest number of MPs at 40, followed by PAS and Gabungan Parti Sarawak (GPS), which have 18 respectively.

Independents and non-aligned parties make up the remaining eight in the 222-seat Dewan Rakyat.

IDE said the BN-PAS pact is expected to raise racial and religious rhetoric in order to win more Malay support.

“Additionally, BN-PAS will benefit from the 2018 delimitation exercise it carried out.”

The BN-PAS pact also highlighted the dangers to PH because the two Malay-based parties took the lion’s share of Malay-majority seats in GE14, where the majority is more than 65% of the voters in the constituency.

In the last elections, BN captured 10 and PAS took 15 of the above 90% Malay-majority seats in Terengganu, Kedah and Kelantan.

PH could only win two: Langkawi and Jerlun. The seats were won by Bersatu’s Dr Mahathir Mohamad and his son Mukhriz Mahathir.

On the bright side, PH took all 24 Chinese-majority seats in Selangor, Penang and Kuala Lumpur, said IDE.

The think-tank said that the last re-delineation exercise increased the number of Malay-majority seats compared with mixed.

Selangor model

Using the 56-seat Selangor legislature as an example, IDE said re-delineation doubled the number of Malay-majority seats in the state.

Prior to this, Selangor had 11 Malay-majority, four Chinese-majority and 41 mixed seats.

However, after the Election Commission proposal was adopted by Parliament a month before GE14, the number of Malay-majority seats increased to 25.

Similarly, Chinese-majority seats increased to five, but mixed seats reduced to 25.

This would be crucial in light of the BN-PAS co-operation and the absence of three-cornered fights, said IDE.

Although, the BN-PAS pact would not be strong enough to win Selangor, it would increase its number of seats from five to 16, while PH will win 40, it said.

In GE14, PH won 51 seats in the state, BN (4) and PAS (1).

IDE also cited the effects of the BN-PAS pact on the Semenyih by-election in March.

In GE14, PH won the seat with 50% of the popular vote as a result of the three-cornered fight: BN (31%), PAS (15%) and others (4%).

However, in the by-election, the coalition lost the seat to BN because it could only win 45% of the vote compared with BN-PAS’s 50%. Independents took the other 5%, said IDE.

IDE, which was started by the PKR-led Selangor government, presented its survey on July 20 at the PKR retreat in Port Dickson.

The IDE survey, which involved 1,597 respondents, was conducted June 28-30.

The Malaysian Insight sighted slides of the presentation recently. – August 2, 2019.