A Vote for Continuity: The 1978 General Elections in Malaysia

Abstract

ENDING MONTHS OF speculation, Malaysia's general elections were held in July 1978.1 Although no one had seriously expected that the elections would result in the defeat of the National Front government or even seriously diminish its parliamentary majority, they did provide the opportunity for checking ethnic and party voting trends, and gave rise to a number of suppositions about politics in Malaysia. Some of these trends and suppositions will be examined in this paper, in addition to a summary of the election issues, the campaign, and the results. When the campaign started there were some areas of uncertainty. First, the electoral rolls of 5,059,689 represented an increase of over 21% (880,775) more registered voters from 1974, and the voting preferences of the new young voters had not yet been tested at the ballot box. Second, Parti Islam Se Malaysia (PAS) was now once again an opposition party, and constituted a serious, although unquantifiable, threat. PAS had been badly beaten in the March state elections in Kelantan, a state that PAS had controlled for 19 years; however there were good reasons to suspect that those results were due to specific Kelantan issues and might not reflect a general PAS decline. It was also clear that PAS was preparing for an all-out effort in Kedah. Third,