Whenever I think of Singapore elections, I’m reminded of a talk that I attended that was given by Kamal Nath, who was India’s transport minister at the time. The host had said something about India’s elections being very messy and Mr. Nath proceeded to go on about how he found it strange that his Singapore counterparts faced an election that involved going up and down a lift.
Mr. Nath is not be the only outsider to be baffled by all
the interest in our elections. As I’ve said in my last few postings that we must
be the only democracy (yes, we are a democracy) on the planet where the
governing party fights to try and whitewash parliament and the opposition
parties fight to be…opposition. In other democracies, an election is inevitably
about fighting to be government. I don’t think its wrong to suggest that we
must be the only place around where the opposition celebrates when it wins four
seats in an election and the ruling party mourns when it has 84 out of a
possible 94 seats. I can imagine every other world leader look at our prime minister
with a sense of sarcastic commiseration of “Boo-Hoo, you lost another four
seats,” in the same way my school matron looked at me and told me, “Boo-Hoo,
you found ONE zit on your face.”
Having said all of that, its probably a good thing from a
survival point of view that our ruling party goes into an over drive correction
type of mode whenever its losses a few seats. It’s a sign that it is at least listening
to the electorate and does not take the electorate for granted (though most of
us would argue that we would rather the government not wait till the election
to listen) and if one were to analyse the election results, one can argue that
the ruling party has a reason to worry.
The first argument, which I’ve used previously, was summed up
by the Young Muslim Politician from Pasir Ris GRC who munches on Pork on a
Ramadan Day, when he said, “Once you go blue, there’s no going back.” Our main opposition
party, the Workers’ Party have proven to be exceedingly good at holding onto
the seats that they’ve won and that’s despite the ruling party doing everything
in the book to make their life miserable. Once a constituency is lost, it’s
pretty much lost.
The second point that should give the ruling party some
concern comes from a table published in the Straits Times, our national daily,
which compared how much the ruling party spent in each constituency and how
much the opposition spent. The table can be seen below:
It goes without saying that the ruling party outspent the
opposition by an average margin of two to one and had by most standards a
pretty thumping win. Like it or not, elections around the world are increasingly
about money. The candidate with the most money has the ability to spend on ads,
events and so on. The most prominent example of this are the American elections,
where aspiring presidential candidates need to raise funds on a consistent
basis in order to stay in the race. While its less pronounced in other parts of
the world, money talks at election time.
Having said that, Singapore isn’t any part of the world. The
ruling party is for the foreseeable future in no danger of being unseated. As
such, the power of patronage remains solely in the hands of the ruling party. It
is the only party in a position to offer things.
So, the first key question that one should ask is why does the
ruling party need to spend twice what its underfunded opponents in order to
convince people to vote for them? In any other democracy, the candidate needs
to work hard to persuade you to give out your vote because, well they may lose
and by extension not be able to give out what they promised. In Singapore it’s
different. The guy promising you a lift upgrading has the ability to grant it.
In case you think your MP won’t have the clout to get you things, the ruling party
will send you someone with the clout – look at how the Prime
Minister-In-Waiting was sent to East Coast Group Representative Constituency (GRC)
just before the election and this was a place where they scrapped through.
The second point can be found in Senkang GRC, which fell to
the Workers Party. The ruling party fielded a minister, who also happened to be
the head of the labour movement. In this constituency, the ruling party outspent
the opposition by nearly three to one instead of the average two to one. Yet,
they lost.
The ruling party has every advantage conceivable. They are the
only party with actual resources to make things happen. They have a track
record of some competence (even if the pandemic did expose some major lapses).
Let’s put it crudely, we all like people who can do things for
us. We all like people to throw money at us. Logic has it that when the only
guy in the room comes in throwing money at people and still gets rejected, it’s
probably because people don’t trust that guy or they suspect something is off
behind that generosity.
Is the ruling party suffering from the laws of diminishing
returns? Whatever it is, the ruling party needs to do some soul searching about
its relationship with the voters, who could still reject them despite the fact
that they could outspend and offer things the other side couldn’t.
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