Malaysia: A New Deal for East Malaysia

What happened: PM Anwar has pledged to increase the number of parliamentary seats for Sabah and Sarawak.

Why it matters: It’s an old demand with new leverage — East Malaysia’s electoral weight could reshape coalition politics, federal budgets and resource control.

What happens next: Expect studies, committees and slow choreography. The promise buys Anwar some loyalty before elections; real delivery, if any, comes later.

Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim’s recent promise to increase parliamentary seats for Sabah and Sarawak was presented as an overdue act of representative rebalancing. In reality, it is another instalment in the theater of East Malaysian appeasement.

Indeed, it's a proposal that gets floated by local politicians whenever the crusade for rights as enshrined in MA63 — the agreement that forms the basis of the formation of Malaysia — meets political uncertainty in the Peninsula, which has been mounting after 2018.

There's no better time to do so than during election season: Sabah will hold its election within the next couple of months, while Sarawak's turn is expected to be next year. Then you have a PM needing his Borneo partners to stay loyal as he moves into campaign mode for his own second term.

The headline claim is simple: Sabah and Sarawak deserve more parliamentary seats, restoring their supposed “one-third” share from the 1963 founding of Malaysia. But today they only hold 56 out of 222 seats, barely a quarter.

To reach a third, roughly 22 new seats must be created, requiring an amendment to Article 46 of the Constitution and a subsequent redelineation by the Election Commission — a process that needs two-thirds support in both Houses of Parliament.

The historical argument rests on shakier ground. The so-called “one-third guarantee” appears nowhere in the Malaysia Agreement itself; it was a political understanding that evaporated when Singapore was ejected from the federation in 1965. It was assumed that Singapore's seats would go to East Malaysia – a highly contentious assumption.

Since then, seat allocation has followed population and convenience rather than east-west symmetry. For East Malaysians, the granular arguments matter less than the recognition of parity — that Sabah and Sarawak were not “joining Malaysia” but co-founding it. Every reference to MA63 becomes shorthand for overdue respect, never mind whether the fine print checks out.

The counter-argument is that adding seats for lightly populated constituencies risks worsening Malaysia’s chronic malapportionment, where rural votes already carry disproportionate weight. East Malaysia's population is over 6mn, the Peninsula's is about 25mn; this means about 20% of the total population would command 33% of Parliament.

Civil society and academics have warned that any seat expansion without a nationwide redelineation will deepen the imbalance and make future elections even less representative. But few care about fairness when coalition stability is at stake. In the court of public opinion, the symbolism of “equal partnership” is easier to sell than a lecture on electoral ratios.

Sabah and Sarawak will have increased leverage over federal decisions, from infrastructure allocations to the more lucrative matter of energy policy. Sarawak’s campaign for resource sovereignty will be strengthened. We've already seen this with the state’s steady encroachment on gas rights.

For now, Sarawak says it only wants downstream domestic control. With more MPs, who is to say they won't expand their demands to include upstream participation, even revenue-sharing formulas.

The highly fractious political scene in Sabah means they cannot press hard on Putrajaya the way Sarawak's dominant GPS can. But their shared constitutional status means Sabah will happily ride on Sarawak's coattails – what Sarawak gets, so too will Sabah.

For Putrajaya, it could mean conceding fiscal ground. A stronger East Malaysian bloc means louder claims over the federal budget. Future big-ticket infrastructure projects and federal allocations may tilt further eastward.

Aside from the Petronas vs Petros dispute over LNG, we've already seen how the national policy on CCUS had carve-outs for Sabah and Sarawak, who insisted on their own regime. This foretells a more fragmented regulatory environment where state-level approvals increasingly gain weight alongside federal ones. Energy sector investors eyeing projects in East Malaysia will need to put in more flights to Kuching and Kota Kinabalu.

This would also alter the national political and policy calculus. A greater East Malaysian presence becomes a counterweight to the opposition Perikatan Nasional (PN) coalition's Malay-Muslim conservative surge in the Peninsula. One of their main policy planks is the implementation of elements of sharia law at the national level. That's a non-starter given Sarawak's Christian-majority and the sizeable non-Muslim minority in Sabah.

There is an added benefit for Anwar. PN has a negligible presence in East Malaysia, where PKR (his party) and loyal coalition partner DAP are well-established. This strengthens his hand while making it harder for PN to claim a national mandate.

PN can always make a deal with East Malaysia, but it will have to be way beyond what Anwar would also be willing to offer.

Anwar has the numbers to make this happen — on paper. In practice, he cannot confidently marshal the two-thirds parliamentary majority without having to negotiate with his coalition partners and even his own party, the vast majority of whose MPs are based in the Peninsula and who will be less than enthused at the prospect of having their own numbers diluted.

The PM knows this, which makes the promise politically inexpensive: it costs nothing to endorse in principle, everything to implement in practice. There will be committees established to study this move; state and federal attorneys general will butt heads; country-wide stakeholder engagements will be held; and the gears will take a long time to reach a bill tabled in Parliament. By which time the next general election (due in 2027) will have passed.

If Anwar gets his second term as PM, he may have greater political standing to act on this; if he loses, all bets are off. For now, the pledge that he made to cheering crowds in Sabah buys him time and loyalty.