Malaysians were waking up to a new political landscape for their country on Thursday after former authoritarian ruler Mahathir Mohamad led opposition parties to their first election victory in six decades the previous day, in a stunning political comeback.

The election result was a political earthquake for the Muslim-majority country.

It ended the National Front's unbroken 60-year rule and swept aside Prime Minister Najib Razak, whose reputation was tarnished by a monumental corruption scandal, a crackdown on dissent and the imposition of an unpopular sales tax that hurt many of his coalition's poor rural supporters.

It is also a surprising exception to backsliding on democratic values in Southeast Asia, a region of more than 600 million people where governments of countries including Thailand, Cambodia and the Philippines have swung toward harsh authoritarian rule.

According to analyst Amir Fareed Rahim, the majority of Malaysians are "pleasantly surprised" by the result, but also "many were overwhelmed with shock and disbelief that something of this scale could actually happen."

He added that Malaysia was now in "in uncharted waters" on a political level.