GE15 ends in hung parliament, without clear winner

20 Nov 2022 08:38am

Pengerusi Suruhanjaya Pilihan Raya (SPR) Tan Sri Abdul Ghani Salleh pada sidang media mengenai keputusan PRU15 di ibu pejabat SPR. - Foto Bernama.

KUALA LUMPUR - The 15th General Election (GE15), the most intense the country had ever faced, has ended in a hung parliament with no party securing a clear majority to form the new federal government.

Pakatan Harapan (PH) had won 82 seats and Perikatan Nasional (PN), 73 seats, as of 4.30 am when the Election Commission (EC) declared the results for 219 of the 222 seats in the Dewan Rakyat.

PN, in its maiden contest in a general election, performed surprisingly well to take all 14 parliamentary seats in Kelantan and all eight seats in Terengganu using the PAS logo, besides forming the state government in Perlis by securing 14 of the 15 state seats.

Barisan Nasional (BN), having set out with confidence to retake the government in Putrajaya, suffered the worst defeat in its political history when it won only 30 seats out of the 178 it contested.

Gabungan Parti Sarawak (GPS) won 22 seats, improving from the 18 it held in the last Parliament; Gabungan Rakyat Sabah (GRS), six seats; Warisan, three; Independents, two; and Parti Bangsa Malaysia (PBM), one. Gerakan Tanah Air (GTA), in its debut, failed to win any seats.

EC chairman Tan Sri Abdul Ghani Salleh, in a press conference at 5 am, said no party had secured a majority of 50 per cent of the 219 seats declared.

The election for the Padang Serai parliamentary seat in Kedah was postponed to Dec 7 after the PH candidate, incumbent M. Karupaiya, died on Nov 16.

Voting in 11 polling centres in the parliamentary constituency of Baram in Sarawak was suspended due to adverse weather while the EC could not announce the result for the Kota Marudu parliamentary seat, also due to the weather.

The outcome reflected the predictions of several political analysts that no party would secure a clear majority and that a multi-coalition government would be the result.

The enforcement of the Constitutional (Amendment) (No. 3) Act 2022, or anti-party hopping law, on Oct 5 prohibited winning candidates from switching political parties to make up the numbers for a majority.