Sabah politics became a tangled web of alliances in the aftermath of the 15th general election.

While Pakatan Harapan appears poised to be the kingmaker who reshapes this web in the next state election, there is growing attention on whether an unfolding graft scandal implicating the ruling state coalition will impact future alignments.

To understand how this will play out, we must first take a brief look at how the current political alignments in Sabah came to be.

While Sabah has a rich political history, a bulk of it - from 1986 to 2018...