Malaysia Opposition in Historic Win

Opposition supporters celebrate the landmark win. (Reuters)

Declaring results in 195 seats out of the 222-seat federal parliament, the Election Commission said the ruling National Front coalition secured 130; Democratic Action Party (DAP) 23; the People's Justice Party (PKR) 22,.and Parti Islam se-Malaysia (PAS) 20, according to the commission website.

"Tomorrow we will start building a brighter future...This is a new dawn for Malaysia," opposition figurehead Anwar Ibrahim, de facto leader of Parti Keadilan Rakyat (People's Justice Party), told reporters.

Keadilan and its opposition allies, the ethnic Chinese-backed DAP and the main Islamist party PAS, had won the northern states of Penang, Kedah, Kelantan and Perak and central Selangor state, added Anwar, the former deputy premier who was sacked and jailed in 1998.

PAS vice-president Husam Musa told reporters the party had won majorities in the state assemblies of the northern states of Kelantan, Perak and Kedah, all of them home to Muslim majorities.

The DAP won the northwestern state of Penang, Malaysia's industrial heartland.

The opposition held just 20 seats in the outgoing 219-seat parliament.

The ruling National Front held a 90 percent majority in the last parliament and is set for a historic setback at these elections.

Shocked

Abdullah was in a state of shock, but accepted the defeat in several areas of his coalition, which has ruled Malaysia for half a century.

"He said that this is how democracy works, and urged people to remain calm and not to celebrate in the streets," The Star newspaper reported him as saying on its website.

Indicative of the debacle, the chief of the Malaysian Indian Congress, a key component of the National Front, lost the seat he had held for 34 years.

The coalition's performance looked to be the worst since 1969, when it last lost its two-thirds majority in parliament in a result that triggered serious racial clashes.

Abdullah won a landslide victory in 2004 polls, but pollsters said he was being punished this time over high inflation, rising crime rates and ethnic tensions in the multicultural nation.

Malaysia's minority ethnic Indians and Chinese had been expected to turn away from the government, but pollsters said the coalition also suffered a loss of support from the majority Muslim Malays that form its bedrock.

"There is a massive swing against the Barisan Nasional among the ethnic Indian and Chinese electorates," Merdeka Centre research firm pollster Ibrahim Suffian told Agence France-Presse (AFP).

"And also a significant swing of about 15 percent, I estimate, from among the Malay electorate as compared to the 2004 elections."