In the corridors of Malaysian federal power, coalition partners govern together with practiced discipline, then step onto campaign trails to dismantle one another before the same electorate they jointly serve. The 2022 general election produced a unity government born not of shared conviction but of shared arithmetic, and the parties within it — Barisan Nasional, Pakatan Harapan, Umno, PAS — have since perfected the art of simultaneous alliance and rivalry. What emerges is less a betrayal of principle than a revelation of one: in a fragmenting political landscape, survival is the only permanen