There have been many attempts to explain the recent victory of Barisan Nasional in the 11th Sarawak state elections. However, many of these analysts often combine the factors that have been contributed to BN’s success all this while and the factors that were instrumental in this particular election.

For some readers who already have some ideas on why BN keeps winning elections in Sarawak, they might be more interested to know the factors which had contributed to BN doing better and the opposition doing worse in the 2016 Sarawak state elections compared to the 2011 Sarawak polls. This article will be focusing on this direction.

Among the factors which are instrumental in keeping the dominance of Sarawak Barisan Nasional in elections for decades are money politics, patronage network, abuse of civil service for political purpose, fear and intimidation and control of media and information. There have been many books and articles written on this subject which could explain all these factors very well.

However, these factors alone could not explain why BN has managed to improve their result from the last elections.

There are a few factors which could be attributed to the improvement of performance of Sarawak BN under Adenan Satem - the ‘Adenan effect’, the Sarawak nationalism sentiment and the disunity of the opposition. Among these factors, disunity of the opposition is deemed as the least important, no less because the combined votes of PKR and DAP in the six overlapping seats still could not surpass the votes of BN’s candidates.

Some might like to point out that it goes beyond the totality of votes and beyond the six overlapping seats as the bickering of PKR and DAP had affected the synergy among Pakatan Harapan’s component parties and undermined the confidence that voters had in them.

While this might be true and Pakatan Harapan better get their act together and prevent the same incident repeated in the future, the first two factors mentioned above, the Adenan effect and the Sarawak nationalism sentiment played more important role in ensuring Sarawak BN won big this time around.

To explain the popularity of Adenan, we have to take note of the global phenomenon of anti-establishment, anti-political elite sentiment which has become widespread in recent years. The amount of distrust in establishment politics, in which people lost faith in political players and rising discontent with ‘business as usual’ in politics have given rise to interesting development in many countries.

The various ‘Occupy’ movements in different countries are one type of the manifestation of it. The other way this sentiment manifesting itself is by the rise of new parties with heavy anti-establishment tone, like the Aam Aadmi Party, which aims to eradicate corruption in India, and the ascendancy of various far left and far right political parties in Europe, which would have been considered as fringe parties a decade ago.

Claiming to be ‘outsiders’

Beside than giving rise to mass movements and small parties, this development also given rise to individuals within the mainstream political parties who claim themselves as ‘outsiders’ and vow to do what the establishment failed to do. They often portray themselves as reformers who have the ability, energy and enthusiasm to do things that could not be done by the establishment either because of their inertia, incompetence, or because they have been bought by vested interests.

Barack Obama in his 2008 presidential campaign was an early sign of this. By the establishment’s standard he was vastly underqualified. However by riding the wave of discontent and portraying himself as the reformer need to overhaul his system, he finally manage fight his way to the White House.

In the primaries for the 2016 presidential election of the United States, the establishment has to deal with the wave created by outsider candidates in the likes of Bernie Sanders in the Democratic Party and Donald Trump in the Republican Party. The latter is almost sure to become the standard-bearer of the Republicans in the upcoming presidential election in November this year.

Closer to home, we have the rise of Narendra Modi in India, Jokowi in Indonesia and the latest is the victory of Rodrigo Duterte in Philippines presidential election. All these figures used mainstream political parties as vehicle to capture power, but they did so by portraying themselves as a committed outsider who has the gut to stand up to the corrupt and incompetent establishment.

In short, they were implying “You might not trust my party, but you could trust me. I am different from all the other politicians. I can change the system from within”.

Narendra Modi is an interesting example because he ran a presidential-style campaign while competing in a parliamentary system. While the Congress Party was a damaged good and expected to be ousted from power in the 2014 Indian General Election, it was not initially clear that that the main opposition party, Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), would win enough seats to form a strong government.

After all, the disaffection that felt by Indian was against the ruling class in general and not solely the Congress party. The Congress took the most hit as it was the one in charge during that period, but it was unlikely that the other mainstream parties would took too much benefit from the sentiment.

The rise of Modi changed the situation dramatically. Portraying himself as an outsider to Delhi politics who promised to steer Indian economy to a new height and tackle issues such as corruption and security, Modi led his alliance to secure a strong majority and his own BJP has won enough seats to govern alone had it wished to do so.

Some might tempted to think in a country such as Malaysia in which the ruling party has been in power since independence, the rise of anti-establishment wave would benefit the opposition enormously. The reality is more complicated than that.

Anti-elites sentiment

Since 2008 the opposition parties have a strong presence in Parliament and are in control of a few state governments. Hence, in the consciousness of many Malaysians they are lumped together with BN as members of the ruling class. At the same time, Malaysia is still an authoritarian, semi-democracy nation in which the playing field between the ruling and opposition parties is very uneven.

Under these circumstances, it is easier for the BN than the opposition to produce a ‘you might not trust my party but you could trust me’ figure, who could use the anti-elites sentiment to benefit his party.

It is clear that Malaysians are affected by this anti-establishment sentiment. In East Malaysia, this discontent has an extra layer. First, in Malaysia generally, people have political fatigue and have the feeling of ‘all politicians are the same’ or ‘both sides are equally bad’. These feelings are shared in both divides of the South China Sea.

However, in East Malaysia, there is an extra layer to this sentiment. As East Malaysians have been marginalised for more than half of century, they also harbour resentment towards the elites in the centre and their local allies who they think are too weak to stand up to their ‘Malayan boss’.

To put in simple words, the first layer is a disdain feeling towards a political class because they has failed Malaysian, which is shared by East and West Malaysians alike; while the second layer is the disdain for the political class by East Malaysians because of their marginalisation.

As the BN is the one in power at federal level and in both East Malaysian states, it is a given that this sentiment will mostly be directed against them. However, the opposition parties are also affected by this kind of sentiment. As mentioned above, as the ruling party in an authoritarian, semi-democracy system, it is far easier for BN to manufacture a ‘you might not trust my party but you could trust me’ kind of politician.

Adenan’s effort to address these two layers of discontent among the people of Sarawak are visible since he came to power in 2014. Some of his policies such as reduction of electric tariffs, abolishment of quit rent and his vow to fight corruption are meant to address the first layer and succeeded in portraying an image of people-centric politician.

However, the more significant part is his move to address the second layer of discontent, by portraying himself as fighter for Sarawak’s autonomy and Sarawak’s way of life, projecting an image of fearlessness and appears as a Sarawak nationalist unintimidated by the Federal Government. All of these contributed to improved result of BN in 2016 Sarawak State Election.

The global backlash against the political class is a real phenomenon. While at the moment Najib seems like the biggest target for such sentiment in Malaysia, the opposition seems unable to fully benefit by the development and sometimes even appears to be dragged along with it. With all the institutional and deep-rooted advantage that BN has in Malaysian political system, they already win by default if people think both sides are equally bad.

If they manage to produce an ‘Adenan’ once in a while, a figure who could claim the mantle of reformer and distancing himself from the rest of the political class, their advantage would be even bigger. The opposition parties in Malaysia need to think of the best way to harness the gain that they could make from this worldwide anti-establishment wave instead of letting themselves be buried by it.