The Economist Intelligence Unit expects the next general election to take place ahead of schedule. Traditionally, the BN has preferred to call elections about a year before the end of its current term of office, suggesting that the next election could be held in early 2012. Speculation that the poll will take place this year has been quelled by the outcome of the Sarawak state election, which showed that the BN has yet to win the full support of ethnic minorities-in this case, Chinese voters. The BN will need far higher levels of support than it received in the Sarawak poll if it is to win a two-thirds majority at the next national election and also regain control of the state assemblies that it lost to the opposition in 2008. The support of ethnic Chinese is particularly important in the opposition-controlled states of Selangor and Penang, where they account for 28% and 41% of the population respectively.

Whenever it takes place, the next parliamentary election will see the cash-strapped opposition PR alliance pitted against the BN's well-oiled political machine. The BN is favourably positioned to win the poll, although how wide its margin of victory will be remains unclear. Mr Najib has worked hard at presenting the image of a politician who is committed to economic reform, but this attitude has yet to resonate among the country's ethnic-minority population, the majority of which voted for the PR in the 2008 general election.

The opposition alliance, for its part, faces a number of obstacles to its bid to wrest power from the BN. Aside from the fact that the PR has less money than the BN, its appeal could be undermined by a newly formed civil rights group, the Malaysian Civil Society Movement (MCSM), and by the recently founded Parti Kesejahteraan Insan Tanah Air (KITA, People's Welfare Party), led by Zaid Ibrahim, who resigned from the PKR in 2010. Both organisations have declared their intention of fielding candidates at the next general election. The PR currently has 76 parliamentary seats, and it is possible that at least one-half of these could be challenged by the MCSM, the KITA or both, thereby potentially taking votes from the PKR.