lCommentary by Jo-Anna Henley Rampas
KOTA KINABALU: The most politically significant moment at this year’s Kaamatan was not on any stage. It was a handshake.
When Shafie Apdal accepted Jeffrey Kitingan’s invitation to appear at the Harvest Festival celebrations in Keningau to sit together, cut ceremonial paddy stalks, and share the same cameras, it was difficult to view the appearance as politically insignificant.
In Sabah politics, presence is a statement. Proximity is a message. And Keningau, the highland heart of STAR’s electoral territory, is not natural ground for WARISAN. Which is precisely why it mattered.
WARISAN’s Strategic Positioning
To understand the political context surrounding WARISAN, we have to go back to GE15.
In 2022, WARISAN contested 53 parliamentary seats nationwide, 25 in Sabah, 27 in the peninsula, and one in Labuan. It was an ambitious attempt to position itself as a national multiracial force.
The results pointed to a different conclusion: WARISAN returned only three seats, all in Sabah, down from eight in GE14. GE15 demonstrated that WARISAN’s substantive electoral strength encompassing its political identity, organisational machinery, and moral authority is fundamentally concentrated in Sabah.
The peninsular campaign yielded nothing. That is not a weakness. It is a strategic clarification.
The clarification carries a specific geographic implication. In the 2025 Sabah state election, WARISAN won 25 seats to GRS’s 29 out of 73, competitive but still trailing, and still absent from the KDM interior.
WARISAN’s strength lies in coastal Muslim Bumiputera constituencies along the west coast corridor, where Shafie’s “East Coast son” identity carries genuine moral weight.
The Kadazandusun heartland roughly four to five parliamentary constituencies anchored in Keningau, Ranau, Pensiangan, and the surrounding Crocker Range highlands has remained beyond its reach.
In GE15, GRS won 6 of Sabah’s 25 parliamentary seats, with the interior KDM belt providing a critical part of that margin.
WARISAN’s path to greater federal relevance may increasingly depend on consolidation rather than expansion, maximising its Sabah parliamentary seat count by reducing the vote-splitting with STAR that has repeatedly allowed GRS to win marginal seats on pluralities.
Potential alignment with STAR also reflects the electoral reality that without the interior KDM seats, WARISAN’s parliamentary ceiling may remain limited in federal coalition arithmetic.
STAR’s Political Considerations
STAR’s political positioning operates in a different but complementary direction.
STAR commands genuine cultural authority in the KDM highlands. A strategic alliance with a party that possesses coastal reach, federal visibility, and experience in multiethnic coalition-building could strengthen STAR’s parliamentary leverage beyond the KDM highlands.
Such an alignment may also be more compatible with a partner whose Sabah-first platform operates outside the constraints of federal coalition commitments.
This is where the structural difference with GRS becomes relevant.
Any party governing within a federal coalition must balance state priorities against coalition commitments — the unavoidable arithmetic of governing in a multilevel system.
WARISAN, outside the unity government, operates without that constraint. Its Sabah-first positioning carries no competing obligation to Putrajaya coalition partners.
This distinction could prove politically significant for STAR. An alliance with WARISAN offers a form of constitutional independence that a GRS partnership, by its nature, cannot.
Together, coastal leverage and highland roots would represent a Sabah bloc that is both constitutionally assertive and structurally unencumbered by peninsular coalition arithmetic, a combination that could potentially strengthen both parties’ federal positioning.
Implications for GE16
Run the arithmetic and the picture sharpens. In GE15, split votes between opposition parties in several Sabah constituencies handed GRS victories on pluralities rather than majorities.
A disciplined WARISAN-STAR electoral pact with agreed seat allocation rather than three-cornered contests could potentially alter outcomes in several marginal seats.
Combined, a coordinated bloc could credibly contest the full breadth of Sabah’s 25 parliamentary seats in a way neither party can achieve alone.
But the more important question is what they do with those seats.
Here the GE15 lesson extends beyond seat counts. Sabah-first branding, effective in state-level mobilisation, faltered when voters shifted into a parliamentary frame.
One phrase captured the structural problem: kita mahu pilih PM, bukan CM “we want to choose the Prime Minister, not the Chief Minister.” Autonomy discourse mobilises state elections. It does not automatically scale into credible federal positioning.
Sabah-first rhetoric has by now become a shared vocabulary across every party contesting in Sabah,
it is no longer a differentiator. What would be genuinely different is a WARISAN-STAR bloc that arrives at GE16 with disciplined seat allocation, an agreed constitutional position, and a clear coalition stance before polling day rather than after it.
The Federal Dimension
Sabah holds 25 parliamentary seats. Malaysia’s coalition landscape appears increasingly fragmented.
With GE16’s current trajectory making a hung parliament increasingly plausible, no federal government can be formed without substantial East Malaysian support.
A WARISAN-STAR bloc does not need to be Sabah’s dominant force. It needs to be Sabah’s most coherent one.
Disciplined parliamentary positioning in Putrajaya, rather than governing authority in Kota Kinabalu, is the realistic and strategically sufficient objective.
What comes next?
The Kaamatan handshake is a beginning, not an outcome. Two leaders appearing together at a harvest festival is a signal.
What converts it into a political force is the harder work that follows: agreed seat allocations, a shared constitutional platform, and a coalition stance declared before polling day rather than negotiated in its aftermath.
Sabahans increasingly want to know not just that their leaders speak loudly about rights, but that those leaders can deliver outcomes from Putrajaya.
Whether the Keningau handshake becomes that kind of alliance is still an open question.
— Jo-Anna Henley Rampas is a PhD candidate at Universiti Malaysia Sarawak researching youth political participation and federalism in East Malaysia. She is a the co-founder of the Smart Talks Sabah podcast.
