KUALA LUMPUR, Aug 14 — DAP secretary-general Anthony Loke expressed his pride after seeing voters put their trust in their candidate Lwi Kian Keong in Selangor's Sg Pelek seat.

Loke said Sg Pelek was a 60 per cent Malay majority district but the fact that they voted for a Chinese candidate shows the Malaysians are more than willing to vote for a non-Malay or non-Muslim candidate despite what the opposition claims.

"The seat we are most proud of winning was Sg Pelek. It's a Malay majority area, close to 60 per cent Malays, 20 per cent Chinese while Indian votes barely make 15 per cent.

"The composition there is 60-40 with 60 being Malays and 40 non-Malays. We put a Chinese person from the grassroots and we beat the Perikatan Nasional candidate, from Bersatu. So this is a very significant win where a Chinese DAP man beat a Malay from PN in a Malay area.

"This shows that Selangor voters including Malays can accept a Pakatan Harapan candidate and for me, this is very significant," Loke said during a press conference today.

Sg Pelek had 47,335 registered voters from which 34,740 turned up to vote. Of that total Lwi garnered 17,984 votes while Suhaimi Mohd Ghazali from PN got 16,526 votes. Independent candidate Nageswari Ravi got 230 votes.

The total percentage of voters in Sg Pelek was 73.4 per cent. Lwi won 51.8 per cent of the votes.

Apart from Loke, DAP veteran Lim Kit Siang, Gobind Singh Deo, Teo Nie Ching, Kelvin Yii, Steven Sim Choo Keong, human resources minister V. Sivakumar, RSN Rayer and others were also in attendance during the press conference.

Overall, the Opposition coalition won 146 out of 245 seats in the state elections while also winning the most significant share of votes — 3.38 million or 49.3 per cent — cast last Saturday.

A total 70.1 per cent or 6.86 million eligible voters in the six states had cast their ballots in Saturday's poll.

Apart from that, Loke said any future cooperation or merger with the Malaysian United Democratic Alliance (Muda) as mooted by Lim has not been discussed.

Loke said like others, Lim gave a personal opinion on the matter after seeing Muda perform poorly in the just concluded state election with their candidates losing their deposits in 20 constituencies.

"As for that we have not decided or discussed anything. What we did do is tell our youth wing DAPSY to strengthen in terms of recruitment and nurture our own young leaders in preparation for the next general elections, so there are no discussions of merger with any other party at the moment," he said.