KUALA LUMPUR - Malaysia’s closely watched state polls have ended in a “3-3” status quo outcome between Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim’s unity government and the opposition alliance, Perikatan Nasional (PN).

The Election Commission announced officially on Saturday night that PN had retained Kelantan, Kedah and Terengganu, with unofficial results showing the coalition had swept to more than two-thirds supermajorities in these states.

Datuk Seri Anwar’s Pakatan Harapan (PH) coalition and its unity government ally Barisan Nasional (BN) have officially retained Selangor, Negeri Sembilan and Penang, after about seven million votes were tallied to see which party will govern six of the federation’s 13 states.

Selangor was the subject of both a concerted assault by the PN coalition as well as a robust defence by PH, with Mr Anwar spending the most time there during the two-week campaign.

While PH and BN managed to triumph in Selangor, PN made huge gains on Saturday compared to the last vote in 2018. Unofficial results peg PH-BN winning 34 of the 56 seats, while PN scooped up the remaining 22 seats, denying its rival a two-thirds majority of the assembly in Malaysia’s richest state.

This is the first time the PH-BN alliance was tested at an election, after the parties set aside decades of bitter enmity to form the federal government in the wake of the November general election.

“There will be no shocks. But now we just have to see whether in Kedah, Terengganu and Kelantan, PH-BN is trashed,” said former Umno Youth chief and health minister Khairy Jamaluddin.

Unofficial results show that PH-BN won just five of the 81 seats on offer in Kedah and Kelantan and failed to stop PN’s clean sweep of Terengganu.

While Datuk Seri Anwar’s comfortable parliamentary majority is not at stake in this election, the polls are widely viewed as an early referendum on his administration less than nine months after the November general election, which gave Malaysia its first ever hung Parliament.

The so-called unity government is led by the premier’s PH coalition with the support of a host of East Malaysian parties, and crucially BN.

In theory, the prizes at stake are control of the six state governments. But the number of seats won by any particular party is important both for the careers of politicians and as a bellwether of how these parties might perform at future polls.

PN is set to easily exceed two-thirds majority – the threshold needed to make constitutional changes – in Kedah, Kelantan and Terengganu, as well as register gains in the three PH-BN states.

The opposition alliance can boast that it continues to gain ground, following its unexpectedly strong showing at November’s general election, when it won 74 of Parliament’s 222 seats.

Meanwhile, Mr Anwar’s unity government might maintain that none of its policies at the federal or state level will be impacted by the outcome of these elections. But it will have to examine why Malay support for it is eroding, and whether the PH-BN partnership is more of a liability than an asset.

“After a full-blooded battle, all parties, win or lose, should join hands to defend the peace and focus on the dignity of the nation and champion the public interest,” the Prime Minister said after the results were announced. “I want to give the assurance that the federal government will continue to be stable after these state elections.”

Concerns had been raised that PH and BN’s long history of bad blood would impede “vote transferability”, with supporters from the two coalitions refusing to endorse each other’s candidates and what they view as an unholy alliance.

Penang Umno chief Musa Sheikh Fadzir said BN accepted the fact that they only won two out of the six seats they contested in the state and promised “a post-mortem to look at our weaknesses and find out why voters rejected us on the four other seats.”

Former premier Muhyiddin Yassin’s PN alliance had sought to capitalise on this to win support especially from the Malay-Muslim majority, who have been the target of claims that Mr Anwar and the Chinese-dominated Democratic Action Party (DAP) in his PH coalition are not protecting the interests of the majority community.

“Is Umno going to have anything in its hand to show that actually it does gain from being in partnership with PH?” ISEAS – Yusof Ishak Institute’s Malaysia Studies Programme coordinator Francis Hutchinson told The Straits Times ahead of Saturday’s vote.

• Additional reporting by Zunaira Saieed