In this year's election there were three, not two, big coalitions contesting and it was unlikely any one of them would win an overall majority in the 222-seat parliament.PN ran a slick campaign, but also appears to have won the support of ethnic Malays in rural areas - the demographic that routinely backs UMNO - thanks to lingering public concern over corruption and over the state of the economy after Covid.The PN leader Muhyiddin Yassin is seen as a relatively clean leader after he was kicked out of UMNO in 2015 for opposing then-Prime Minister Najib Razak over his involvement in a massive financial scandal known as 1MDB."The principal underlying reason is the poor economic conditions and inflation which have hit most Malaysian households, still struggling to get out from the effects of the pandemic lockdown" says Ibrahim Suffian from the Merdeka Centre for Opinion Research.All of which explains why the negotiations since the elections results came in on Sunday morning have been so intense, and the Malaysian Agong, or king, has had to extend the deadline to form a government by 24 hours."