I have been most encouraged by the great response to my first article on GE 2011, and have written another. Indeed, the historic election had so many different aspects worth exploring that I am inspired to do a few more to share my thoughts and musings with readers.
GE 2011 sprang so many surprises—the emergence of a bright, fearless young electorate, the star performance of the opposition Workers’ Party, the exit of Singapore’s most durable opposition member, Chiam See Tong, as well as of one of the PAP’s most highly regarded ministers, George Yeo—that one would be hard put to single out any one of them as the most attention-grabbing.
For me, the most significant of these surprises in terms of its potential for permanently changing the Singapore political landscape, was the crumbling of the PAP model of governance that had, for nearly half a century, been unabashedly held up by the leaders as the best model for Singapore, creating the famed hard pragmatic thinking and the stern, no-nonsense style.
Midway through the campaigning, the PAP leaders sensed, to their shock, what they would never have believed possible—the rejection of the model by the people. Overnight, the famed posture of overweening confidence vanished, replaced by self-doubt and fear. It resulted in a rush by the PAP team of campaigners, led by the Prime Minister himself, to apologise profusely, to astonished Singaporeans, for mistakes made in the past, and to promise humbly to do better in the future.
Very quickly, what had begun as an election ruse, morphed into an earnest promise to the people, with the Prime Minister reiterating the message in his first post-election speech, and reinforcing it, in the days immediately following, with a pledge to do some ‘soul-searching’. The need to change from within was discussed, in a disarmingly frank press interview, just days after the election, by the PAP’s biggest casualty, George Yeo. Mr Yeo, in a gesture both heroic and humble, pledged to devote his future, in whatever role, to helping the government ‘review the way it governs’ in order once more to connect with the people.
This collective mea culpa of the PAP, signalling a mindset change that I had thought I would never see in my lifetime is, to me, the single, most extraordinary happening in GE 2011, that will set the tone and shape of Singapore politics for some time to come.This collective mea culpa of the PAP, signalling a mindset change that I had thought I would never see in my lifetime is, to me, the single, most extraordinary happening in GE 2011, that will set the tone and shape of Singapore politics for some time to come. It allows the political observer to do some fairly confident crystal-ball gazing on a number of on-going issues:
1) the accustomed hard-nosed, peremptory and arrogant PAP style will be changed into a softer, gentler, carefully crafted people-oriented approach.
2) sheer numerical strength and dominance in Parliament will no longer mean the smooth and guaranteed passage of policies, as in the past. Although in principle the PAP majority can still ride roughshod over the opposition’s objections, in practice they will want to be seen as civilly engaged in debate (even if annoyingly protracted) with a newly empowered opposition backed by the new mood and expectations of the people.
3) the hitherto predictably staid tone of Singapore’s parliamentary sessions will be a thing of the past, replaced by the vigour of combative sparring between the PAP and a newly emboldened opposition. Although ingrained Singapore habits of politeness will avoid the rambunctiousness seen in parliamentary sessions elsewhere, there will be enough noise to produce two markedly different reactions from Singaporeans—the liberal-minded young will cheer while the conservative elderly will be dismayed and may even yearn for a return of the good old orderly days. For the first time, the society will be exposed to what can pass for the normal democratic processes of open debate.
4) The Workers’ Party will go all out to debate two political schemes that the PAP had long set in place, namely the GRC and the NCMP which they claim work against the opposition. Already severely critical of them, when it had only one representative in Parliament, the party will debate them with even more animosity now that it has a much larger representation. It is most unlikely that the PAP will back down on such major, well established schemes; they will very likely reach out directly to the people, in a massive exercise of friendly persuasion, through their various communication and feedback channels, including the social media. This new charm offensive will be their way of combating the increasing popularity of the Workers’ Party.
5) The hottest issue will be the most controversial one of the ministerial salaries and will be played up by the Workers’ Party both in and outside Parliament. That the PAP is not prepared to budge on it was already, though only indirectly, signaled by the Prime Minister when, in his apology to the people during the election campaign, he singled out certain issues that he promised to look into, but pointedly excluded that of the ministerial salaries. The Worker’s Party may also be tempted to raise other controversial issues which, because they are also about the use of public money, have a special resonance for Singaporeans. One of these targeted issues will most certainly be the government’s accountability in the use of the country’s vast reserves for investments that had chalked up huge losses.
The honeymoon of the victorious Workers’ Party and their euphoric supporters will be quickly over, as everyone watches to see how the party deals with hard realities and lives up to their election promises.6) The honeymoon of the victorious Workers’ Party and their euphoric supporters will be quickly over, as everyone watches to see how the party deals with hard realities and lives up to their election promises. The ambiguities, uncertainties and disruptions that will come with the sudden transition of Singapore society into the still unknown, uncharted territory of political change, will be their special testing ground. There will be enough opportunities, including those created by events in the outside world, to allow both the PAP government and the opposition to claim victories and gloss over defeats. It is very likely that the Workers’ Party, probably still not yet in possession of its full complement of resources and definitely still a long way from matching the formidable PAP machinery, will make mistakes that may be serious enough to provoke a ‘We told you so’ triumphalism from the PAP, as both sides work hard to win the hearts and minds of the people.
7) The enormous influence of Minister Mentor, Lee Kuan Yew, will be considerably diminished, if not ended altogether. In the GE 2011 campaigning, his blunt, angry ‘live and repent’ warning to the opposition-leaning Aljunied constituents made him a liability rather than an asset to the PAP. The Prime Minister instantly scrambled to do damage control, asserting that he and his colleagues did not necessarily think like MM. He even candidly revealed that MM was exasperated that they had chosen to do things differently in the election. It was his first unambiguous public repudiation of the influence of someone long assumed to be the real power in the PAP leadership. As a respectful son, he softened the hard message with a gesture of resigned and gentle acceptance, saying somewhat ruefully, ‘MM will always be MM’. During the election campaigning MM went his own separate way, displaying his accustomed stern, unrelenting style and clearly alienating a lot of the voters. It is obvious that as an uncompromising conviction politician, he will be increasingly isolated from his consensus-seeking colleagues who will nevertheless, in the still prevailing Confucianist ethos of Singapore society, continue to accord him public respect. As his influence fades away, so will the most infamous PAP instrument of control—the defamation suit which silences political dissidents by financially crippling them.
GE 2011 may well be remembered as marking the sad, anti-climactic exit of the founder of modern Singapore.As if to support PM’s assurance to Singaporeans that his controversial influence is effectively over, even if he continues to be in politics, a newly chastened MM made known, on 14 May, just a week after the election, his resignation from the cabinet (in a joint statement with Senior Minister, Mr Goh Chok Tong, who was also resigning from the cabinet). It will take some time for Singaporeans to digest the enormity of this development, surely a historic one. GE 2011 may well be remembered as marking the sad, anti-climactic exit of the founder of modern Singapore.
In short, what will take place after GE 2011, at least in the short term, will be no less than a transformation of the Singapore political landscape, brought about, strangely, by circumstances nobody could have foreseen. GE 2011 may already have written a new chapter of the Singapore political narrative.
Can the crystal ball predict the long-term effects of GE 2011, say, past GE 2016, 2021, maybe even 20 years down the road?
While prediction has become risky business in a volatile, fast changing world, especially for a small country like Singapore necessarily affected by external events, the crystal ball can foretell the outcome of one event, though not the event itself, that will mean the wrecking of all the above mentioned predictions.
when the nation’s very survival is at stake, the PAP model of governance, based on the strongman’s rule espoused by Lee Kuan Yew, is likely to make a comebackThis direful possibility is a major national crisis, the local equivalent of 9/11, whether caused by nature, such as some horrific pandemic, or by man, such as a grotesque terrorist attack, or some huge international financial turmoil that could completely destroy Singapore’s economy. In such a scenario, when the nation’s very survival is at stake, the PAP model of governance, based on the strongman’s rule espoused by Lee Kuan Yew, is likely to make a comeback. For it is essentially a crisis-driven model, forged in the crucible of the tumultous early years of a young, struggling Singapore, when the brute realities of safety, livelihood and basic needs made any issues of democratic processes completely irrelevant. Such a catastrophic eventuality will unravel all the gains of GE 2011 and take Singapore back to square one.
It must be the fervent wish of all Singaporeans, celebrating the rare victory of GE 2011, that a disaster of such apocalyptic proportions will never take place, in order that the society will have time to grow, mature, and eventually preside over the demise of a system of governance that had seen its uses and, along the way, lost touch with the needs and aspirations of a younger generation.
Is there a companion to the crystal ball, say, a crystal mirror that instead of predicting the future, shines forth wise advice about how to manage it? If there were, it might offer this advice to Singaporeans, after the heat of GE 2011 has died down, using the words of a great statesman: ‘In war, resolution; in defeat, defiance; in victory, magnanimity; in peace, goodwill.’ Uttered in a larger, loftier context, they can still be applied to the aftermath of a most bruising election in our little island nation. For after the tough fight of the electoral battle, after the headiness of victory and the bitterness of loss, there should be no place for the pettiness of gleeful gloating or vindictive planning. Instead there should be some measure, if not of magnanimity and goodwill, at least of honest purpose and readiness to work together for the common goal of the society’s well-being.
