Singapore has just finished a General Election and as
expected the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) has been returned to power.
What was nobody expected was the way in which they won it. Despite having
smaller crowds at rallies than the opposition and the talk about how many seats
they’d concede, the ruling party managed to increase their share of the popular
vote by nearly 10 percent and they retook a seat from the Worker’s Party (WP),
the main opposition party. Our finance minister even went as far as claiming
some 70 plus percent in his constituency.
In a way, this shouldn’t have been unexpected. The truism in
politics is that elections are not won by opposition parties but by lost by
governments. Despite the opposition putting up a somewhat credible fight with
the help of social media, the government simply had not done enough to lose the
election.
The facts are as simple as this, in the Westminster System,
the government has every advantage. The ruling party can call an election at
any time within a 5-year period. The ruling party has every right to redraw
electoral boundaries and most importantly, it’s always the ruling party that
has the power of patronage. Singapore’s government has shown that it is willing
and able to use every advantage it has just to stay in power. The Prime
Minister timed it perfectly – we had an election after one month of our biggest
birthday bash and several months after the nation had finished lionizing his
departed father.
The government was helped by the fact that the opposition
has yet to get its act together and some of the more colourful characters decided
to remain just that. One of them started by starting that his opponent from the
ruling party would be hampered by being a mother thus ensuring that a nation
filled with working mothers would be turned against him. Then there was Kenneth
Jeyaretnam, the Secretary General of the Reform Party who promptly chided the
electorate for not voting him in – not exactly a smart move from a man who is
smart enough to get a double first from Cambridge University and has ambitions
to sit in parliament.
So where does this leave Singapore? The answer is pretty
much where it was prior to the election. The ruling party will continue as it
has. The main danger it faces is complacency – hence the electorate has kept
the WP where it was before the election (With 6 seats out of 89). The other
danger facing the ruling party is that it has learnt the wrong lessons from its
resounding victory. Yes, it was right to “listen” to the people but it also
needs to push through necessary reforms that will hurt the general population
in the short run but are important. One of the key issues remains the questions
of labour. Singapore needs labour and given that we have an influx of Ka-Ni-Na’s
and Pundeks who would rather beg than work, we need to get our labour from
elsewhere. The need for darkies from the rest of Asia is greater than ever –
they should be allowed in and be given the chance to better themselves.
For the opposition, in particular the WP, the lesson remains
this – prove yourself with what you have and build up slowly. The WP had the
right strategy in winning it one seat at a time and proving that they would run
something. Low Thia Kiang was MP for Hougang for nearly two-decades before the
party took the Group Representative Constituency (GRC) of Aljunied in the 2011
Election.
Unfortunately, they made the mistake of allowing the ruling party to
attack their accounting practices. While no serious charges were brought
against them in court, the electorate questioned their basic competence and integrity.
Fact remains, the WP held onto Aljunied GRC by the skin of their teeth.
The second lesson for the opposition is that, it needs to
consolidate, preferably under the umbrella of the WP, which at the time of
writing, seems to be the only opposition party that recognizes that good speeches
are pointless unless you have seats in parliament. It’s hard to see the Old
Carthusian (I must confess that Charterhouse where my rivals in schools karate
championship) and Cambridge Educated Mr. Jeyaretanam subordinating himself to
Mr. Low, but this is what he and others like him need to do if they hope to
smell a seat in parliament. Mr. Jeyaretnam risk becoming the Singapore version
of the Monster Raving Loony Party chaired by the late Screaming Lord Sutch.
Opposition politics in Singapore is a thankless task but
someone has to do it and eventually, the ruling party will slip. When it does,
the nation will need another party to take up the mantle of government. Patience
and consolidation are the two virtues that the opposition parties need to work
on.
