With her good looks and celebrity appeal, Nicole Seah has put politics back into the mainstream for a generation of disaffected and apathetic youths
By Cheryl Chan
Political Correspondent
When Nicole Seah announced her candidacy for Marine Parade GRC a couple of weeks ago, there was no way she could have predicted that she was soon to become Singapore’s second-most popular politician on Facebook – so popular indeed that watch retailers City Chain would offer her an five-figure endorsement deal.
Though she subsequently turned down the offer – thought to be the first ever to have been made to a politician in Singapore – the fact that City Chain wanted her as its poster girl speaks volumes about how she has managed to capture the attention of a generation that has been branded apathetic, apolitical and indifferent.
Ms Seah has managed to get young Singaporeans interested in politics, something that perhaps no politician from either the ruling or opposition parties has managed to do for the best part of 25 years.
Her good looks and ‘star appeal’, coupled with her aggressive, direct and passionate rally speeches, have led the country’s ‘Generation Y’ to take an interest in politics for the first time in their lives, with many on the internet labelling her a ‘hero’, ‘saviour’ and ‘Singapore’s great hope’.
Despite her popularity, Ms Seah will not win her electoral contest in Marine Parade and will not be returned as a Member of Parliament, thanks to Singapore’s skewed political landscape and one-sided electoral rules.
But that isn’t quite the point. She has already won a battle that many seasoned veterans before her could not have even dreamed of winning – she has managed to make politics cool, and in so doing, she has sounded a clarion call to Singapore’s cynical and materialistic youth to rediscover their idealism. She has given them the impetus and the inspiration to dream. And most importantly, she has shattered the old paradigm that politics was best left to the politicians, being a living example that anyone and everyone can play a part in shaping the country’s future.
The idealism of youth has always been the catalyst for social change. Students, in particular, have been at the forefront of just about every significant political movement in the past century, not always with good results – as the Tiananmen Square incident in 1989 will attest. Nonetheless, no change can be brought about without the involvement of raw youthful passion, as evidenced by the fact that Lee Kuan Yew was in his 30s when he first led Singapore’s independence movement. Many of his comrades, including Lim Chin Siong, were in their 20s.
Nicole Seah has become a social media phenomenon, with more than 46,000 fans on Facebook and a host of fan videos on YouTube
Since the heady days of Merdeka, however, Lee and his PAP colleagues have sought to suppress Singapore’s hotbeds of political activity – subjugating key institutions such as the press, the Law Society and the NUS Students’ Union, no to mention closing down Nanyang University altogether.
Knowing full well that a bourgeois society would be more resistant to change, they set out to ensure that Singapore enjoyed the highest rates of savings and home ownership in the world, through social engineering mechanisms such as the Central Provident Fund (CPF) and Housing Development Board (HDB).
The result? For the past two to three decades, young Singaporeans have eschewed and even become fearful of political participation. Instead, they have busied themselves with the pursuit of wealth and material acquisitions – best encapsulated by the ‘five Cs’ of cash, car, condominium, credit card and country club.
The level of apathy and cynicism towards any idealistic cause has led even the present generation of PAP leaders to worry; Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong recently commented that it was very difficult to get private sector high-flyers to join the party because they were afraid of ‘risking failure’ in politics. So much so that the PAP has had to offer its ministers million-dollar salaries to make up for the opportunity costs of public service.
Nicole Seah is not going to change all of this overnight. However, her meteoric rise to stardom has confirmed that there is hope for Singapore’s youth. By bringing political consciousness back into the mainstream – where it undoubtedly belongs – she has reminded young Singaporeans that they have a crucial role to play in shaping the country’s future.
Now, that’s pretty darn cool.
The author is a political correspondent at The Satay Club. She works as an analyst in a leading multinational research firm.
http://satayclub.net/2011/05/nicole-makes-politics-cool-again/