While we cannot agree with the way these people have commented, BN did win the Sarawak Elections because people voted for them. Image from Raja Petra Kamarudin’s Facebook.
The “ignorant” tribes people who voted for BNĪfter the news of that BN had won the Sarawak Elections by a landslide broke out, many people (presumably West Malaysians) poured out their anger on social media. And that seems to be the main thing that led BN to victory in this election.ĥ. He is someone that the Straits Times called a “popular leader who makes the right moves”. That is aside from abolishing tolls, and being very vocal on many issues from Bibles to development, to racism. But the thing is, a poll by Merdeka Center (an independent pollster), found that about 1/3 of Sarawakians actually agreed with the Chief Minister for banning them!So the risk actually paid off? But why?ĭAP’s Lim Guan Eng himself also said that DAP losing 5 seats was down to Adenan Satem’s popularity, while also adding that his popularity helped people overlook how he banned opposition leaders from coming into Sarawak AND all the scandals surrounding Najib.Īnd to be fair, Adenan Satem really seems to have done a lot for Sarawak. At the end of last year, it was reported that he completed 1,818 rural transformation projects across Sarawak that came about from a RM500 million allocation from the state budget. He said that the state gomen was taking a risk by banning opposition politicians because it went against Chief Minister Tan Sri Adenan Satem’s image as liberal. In the same article, another analyst, Dr Faisal Hazis, said that Sarawak would have won without the banning. This is an unfair contest right from the beginning that to the authoritarian behaviour of Adenan (Satem).” – IDEAS Chief Executive, Wan Saiful Wan Jan, as quoted by The Malay Mail Online The state government that is supposed to be a caretaker government is denying them the right to campaign. “This will have a negative impact on Pakatan Harapan. Whether Sarawak actually has the power to do that was a topic of discussion for a while, but it did receive a lot of backlash from the opposition (naturally). And before the elections, IDEAS (a think tank) Chief Executive Wan Saiful Wan Jan, actually said that this would affect the election results. Aside from Hannah Yeoh (one of the more recent ones) other prominent names include:Īnd the only person not banned in these pictures is actually Lim Guan Eng. In a previous article, we discussed how the Sarawak gomen had been banning prominent opposition leaders from entering Sarawak. I’m here for an event hosted by the church. Opposition leaders not allowed in Sarawak So money may have played a role in BN winning as well, money that the opposition simply did not have.ģ. So much that if you average out the amount of money promised for various projects among the voters of Sarawak, it comes down to RM5000 per voter! “There were multiple reports by local residents of being given RM20 to RM50 for attending political events and told to vote for a certain candidate.” – Lena Hendry, team member of Pemantau Sarawak, as quoted by The Malay Mail Onlineīut aside from these little things, political analyst Bridget Welsh also said that BN also promised a heck of a lot of money for projects to Sarawakians during this election. Image from Republic of Sarawak Twitter profile. Part of a comparative study of electoral dynamics across Southeast Asia, Electoral Dynamics in Sarawak seeks both to analyse the wider lessons to be learned from the 2016 Sarawak state elections as well as to deepen our knowledge and understanding of a state which is likely to play an especially important role in the political future of Malaysia.Click to see more.
Central to the analyses in this volume are not only the role of ethnicity and the urban/rural divide but also the longer term impact of the politics of developmentalism, the personality politics surrounding Chief Minister Adenan Satem and the emerging force of Sarawakian states' rights enshrined in the Sarawak for Sarawakians (S4S) social movement. Covering Ba' Kelalan, the rural stronghold of Sarawak Parti Keadilan Rakyat (People's Justice Party) leader Baru Bian Tupong, the urban Malay-majority stronghold of the PBB Stakan, a mixed constituency in which postal votes proved decisive and Repok and Meradong, rural Chinese majority constituencies caught between the Sarawak United People's Party and the Democratic Action Party, this volume exposes the diversity and complexity of Sarawak's electoral geography. Based upon observation of the 2016 Sarawak state elections at a time of political turmoil for the ruling Barisan Nasional coalition, Electoral Dynamics in Sarawak offers four ethnographic accounts of grassroots electoral politics in diverse constituencies of Sarawak.