Malaysia's opposition alliance struggled on Thursday to reach power-sharing pacts in states that fell under its control in weekend elections dubbed a “political tsunami”. The three opposition parties, which won five out of 13 states in a shock election result, are now in a post-election battle to share the spoils without stoking racial and religious tensions. “Things are looking very, very fragile for opposition-held state governments,” said Zainon Ahmad, the political editor of the local Sun newspaper. “They have difficulty in dividing the spoils of war.” First one and then another of the parties in the opposition alliance threw a fit over representation in the new Perak government, before Sultan Azlan Shah, the state's titular leader, cancelled the swearing-in ceremony on Thursday in exasperation. The Chinese-based Democratic Action Party (DAP) on Thursday retracted an earlier threat to boycott the ceremony because the Sultan had named Mohammad Nizar Jamaluddin of the Pan-Malaysian Islamic Party (PAS) as chief minister. The party was initially upset since it and a third party in the alliance, the People's Justice party led by former deputy premier Anwar Ibrahim, won more state seats in Perak than PAS did at Saturday's elections. But things calmed down after Mohammad Nizar promised that the DAP would get most of the seats in the state cabinet, said Ngeh Koo Ham, DAP chairman for Perak who is in line to become the state's deputy chief minister. It was all just a “little misunderstanding”, he told Reuters. Then it was the turn of People's Justice Party to get upset. It issued a statement saying the party thought the DAP was getting too many seats and therefore maybe People's Justice would not participate in the new government. In the end, all the brinksmanship yielded a formula the three parties could live with, apparently. A PAS official said the matter had now been resolved after DAP agreed to reduce its representation in favor of Anwar's party and PAS. The secular DAP has long been suspicious about PAS, which advocates Islamic law for Muslims and punishments such as stoning and amputations, though it downplayed that agenda in the election. In neighboring Selangor state, a leader of the People's Justice party was sworn in as that state's new chief minister, and said he would name his cabinet at a later date. Anwar pulled together the loose opposition alliance and his People's Justice is now the largest opposition party in parliament with 31 seats. It is also the most multi-racial in Malaysia's largely ethnic-based political party system with 20 Malay, seven Chinese, and four Indian MPs in its line-up -- a proportion that basically mirrors the population breakdown. Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi's Malay-dominated coalition lost the two-thirds parliamentary majority it held for four decades and an unprecedented five states fell to the opposition in the watershed elections. Chinese and Indians, accounting for a third of the population, deserted Abdullah's National Front coalition, venting anger over handouts for “Bumiputras” (sons of the soil) and perceptions their religious freedoms were being squeezed. The opposition alliance won control of state governments in Penang, Kedah, Selangor and Kelantan. PAS has formed a single party government in Kelantan, while DAP leads Penang. __
