Repent, sinners, if thou shalt vote for the opposition
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Repent, sinners, if thou shalt vote for the opposition
SINGAPORE’S general elections rarely draw much attention from beyond the shores of this tiny island-state. After all, the result is hardly in doubt. The People’s Action Party (PAP), founded by Lee Kuan Yew and his fellow “men in white”, as they are known, has won every election since independence—and usually by a huge margin. Indeed, in the last parliament the opposition won just two contested seats, and that was considered a good-ish result for them. So when the current general election officially kicked off on April 27th, anyone could be forgiven for struggling to stifle a yawn.
Yet now that we are into the short campaigning period, with polling day set for May 7th, the political atmosphere seems to be at least as intense and combative as in any British or American election. It’s almost as if the opposition parties think that they really can win a handful of seats! But surely not?
The big outdoor rallies, held between 7pm to 10pm in the evenings, are packed—one friend estimated that there were probably about 40,000 people at a Workers’ Party stadium rally that she attended. They are festive but well-ordered affairs. The thousands who go along listen carefully to the arguments put over from the podium; they really do want to hear about a viable alternative to the PAP. Indeed, some enthusiastically talk about this election being a “watershed”. Opposition politicians argue that now is the time for “change”—and many actually seem to believe in it.
Older and wiser heads however counsel me against taking too much of this too seriously. In a country where political debate is normally quite limited, the election campaign period serves as a safety valve, they say—people can blow off a bit of steam and then we can all return to a peaceful, stable, PAP way of life, just as before. The iron laws of Singaporean electoral arithmetic will prevail, as ever.
Maybe so, but there is undoubtedly something a bit different going on this time. Specifically, the opposition has altered its tactics, mounting an unusually concerted attack on the PAP. And there are real issues now that the opposition can exploit.
On tactics, the opposition is contesting more seats than ever before. In previous elections, such was the PAP’s lock on the Group Representation Constituencies (GRCs), each of which returns up to six MPs as a single-party block, that the non-PAP parties rarely bothered to contest even half.
Now, only Lee Kuan Yew’s GRC will be unopposed. The Workers’ Party, the biggest of the six main opposition parties, is concentrating its firepower in just one GRC, Aljunied. Its five candidates there include all its top leaders, most prominently Low Thia Khiang, Sylvia Lim and Pritam Singh. Judging from the campaign so far, they certainly have the best hope in a long time of taking down a prized GRC. If they do manage it, that would constitute something of a political tsunami by Singaporean standards—and they would also claim a very prominent PAP scalp, that of George Yeo, the foreign minister.
All this clearly has the PAP a bit rattled, if Lee Kuan Yew’s comments are anything to go by. Fighting his own 14th election, the 87-year-old “Minister Mentor” (MM), as he is officially known, has been warning voters of the dire “consequences” of voting against the PAP. “You must expect the PAP to look after PAP constituencies first”, he told reporters. Thus if the unfortunate voters of Aljunied really do have the temerity to vote out the PAP, they will have “five years to live and repent”, according to MM. Asked if this sort of provocative language could cause a backlash against the PAP among voters, MM himself remained wholly unrepentant: “I am 87. I am speaking the truth. I do not want to be hypocritical.” So there.
The rising cost of everyday goods and services in an already expensive city is the main worry for Singaporeans, and this has become the main campaign message for many opposition politicians. Immigration has become part of the mix too; opposition candidates argue that the steady stream of low-cost workers coming to Singapore depresses wages for Singaporeans, thus adding to their worries about rising prices. Some parties argue for reductions in taxation, or special help for the elderly and other groups.
The PAP argues that Singapore should stick to its traditional free-market, low-welfare policies, arguing that the best way to combat rising prices is to help the already flourishing economy grow even further. Last year Singapore achieved the second-highest growth rate in the world, after Qatar.
The PAP should still win comfortably. But given their past electoral hegemony, if they lose even one GRC—or, at the very extreme realms of possibility, two—that would be a shock. At the very least, this time round the PAP will know that it has been in a fight.
http://www.economist.com/blogs/banyan/2011/05/singapores_general_election
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The dilemma is really simple.
Vote for the opposition and repent for 5 years.
Vote for the fascists and you ruminate and repent for a lifetime.
It's a simple choice, no?
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I cannot betray my principles and betray Singapore by voting for PAP.
I will vote for opposition.
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I am voting opp too.
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Paul G. Buchanan: A Door Cracks Open in the Little Red Dot
On May 7 2011, 2.5 million Singaporeans (out of a total population of 5 million) go to the polls.
As a one party-dominant authoritarian state, the outcome is already assured--the People's Action Party that has held power since 1959 will win.
By gerrymandering electoral districts (which has led to uncontested walkover rates of 50 percent) and placing limits on opposition party rights to public expression and assembly outside of the two week campaign season (to include prohibitions on holding rallies and distributing flyers, posters or pamphlets, which has resulted in numerous defamation suits against and arrests of opposition figures over the years--the last in 2010 for a violation of the "no public assembly of more than 5 people without a Police permit" law), the PAP might match the 66 percent of the vote garnered in 2006 (a drop from the 73 percent received in 2001).
It will retain its majority hold of the (recently expanded) 87-member parliament. But there is political change blowing in the hot and humid Singaporean breeze, which is as much the result of generational and social change as it is of opposition renewal and PAP sclerosis. Although it will retain power this time, none of the trends auger well for the PAP.
Taking 25 years as the generational baseline, Singapore is in its third generation since gaining political autonomy from the Malay Federation in 1959 (independence came with its expulsion from the Federation in 1965). Led by 87-year old Lee Kwan Yew, the first generation of PAP leaders ruled with tight control until 1990, in an era when Singapore's image as an austere and puritanical authoritarian state was forged.
The second generation of hand-picked successors, who began the slow process of political and social liberalization and orchestrated the emergence of the country as a major transportation, logistics and financial hub, is singing its political swan song today. This year's election marks the transition to the third generation of political leadership and not all has gone as planned for the PAP.
Voting is mandatory in Singapore. Yet spoiled ballots and non-voters amounted to nearly 10 percent of the 2006 electorate. In other words, the signs of discontent were already present five years ago.
This year there has been a resurgence of political opposition led by the Workers Party, the Reform Party and the Singapore Democratic Party. In marked contrast to previous elections, 82 of the 87 parliamentary seats will be contested. Among the ranks of the opposition are defectors from the PAP, former government-sponsored overseas scholars (who usually pay their scholarship debt by returning to assume bureaucratic positions and joining the PAP), former Internal Security Act detainees (the ISA allows for the indefinite detention of suspects without charge and some of the current opposition candidates have spent long periods in confinement) and political exiles.
Most of the new candidates are in their mid 20s to mid 40s, thereby representing a coming of age for their generation of free thinkers.
In response, the PAP has trotted out the usually ensemble of former bureaucrats and politicized retired military officers, interspersed with a handful of younger neophytes (including one whose qualifications for office apparently are that she is the wife of the Prime Minister's executive assistant and has a penchant for shopping--the latter being Singapore's national pastime).
What is most revealing is that the PAP is no longer able to hide its internal divisions, with leading officials, Ministers and even the Minister Mentor (how's that for a title?) Lee Kwan Yew himself openly disagreeing about issues of politics, policy and social construction.
Sensing a shift in the public mood, some PAP candidates have withdrawn from the election.
All of this underscores something that the Minister Mentor said last year: that the PAP must rejuvenate or stagnate, and that democracy would only come when the PAP proved incapable of responding to public expectations as a result of its stagnation.
The trouble for the PAP is that the elections have come too quickly for a major re-generation of its cadres, which in a talent-thin environment such as Singapore (owing to its population size, as anyone who looks beyond the front benches of the New Zealand parliament will understand), means that the moment of political reckoning has come much sooner than the 25 years Lee Kwan Yew envisioned.
Even worse for the PAP, although the government controls all of the mainstream media in Singapore, including the Straits Times and the telecommunications giant MediaCorp, it has been unable to staunch the flow of internet criticism of its personnel and policies, or the grassroots mobilization of support for the opposition.
Much concern has been voiced about increasing inefficiencies in public services, the high cost of living, the loss of white collar jobs to foreigners, and the government's astronomical pay scales (the Prime Minister--Lee Kwan Yew's son--is paid S$4.5 million per/year, senior ministers make S$3 million and parliamentary backbenchers start at S$150,000.
In fact according to the Economist, Singapore has the second highest ratio of political leader's pay to the country's GDP per person, with the average salary of US$2,183,516).
In the face of what looks to be the possibility of losing previously safe seats amid an unprecedented wave of electoral contestation, the PAP has resorted to fear-mongering, focusing on the tired old canards of economic insecurity, Malay sedition, jihadist terrorism, unskilled foreign workers from the sub-continent and mainland China bringing crime and stealing local jobs, and gay rights (homosexuality is illegal in Singapore but as part of the social liberalization process enforcement of sodomy laws has been weak and episodic over the last decade.
This has been a major concern of social conservatives, including the very large number of ethnic Chinese Christians found on the island who are a core PAP constituency). Is speaks ominously of hidden agendas and questions why the opposition would seek to take control of government (apparently failing to recognize that the purpose of political parties include competing for the authority to govern or at least influence government policy). Yet the more it raises the specter of Singapore returning to its polyglot swampland brothel and opium den past, the more the PAP is ridiculed for being out of touch with the wants and needs of contemporary Singaporeans.
This means that this election and its aftermath will constitute a critical juncture in Singaporean history. It will set the stage for the next critical juncture, which will be the occasion and aftermath of Lee Kwan Yew's death.
The notion of critical juncture is important and needs explaining. Using economics-derived path dependency analysis (in which human behavior is "locked in" by past institutional practice the more that practice is routinised over time), critical junctures are historical moments when decisive choices are made within given institutional parameters that set the future course of events (the most common used analogies are the "fork in the road" and “tree branch” motifs).
Because of its internal divisions, Lee Kwan Yew's death will be the moment when the knives come out within the PAP, with moderate reformists and liberalizers pitted against hard-line status quo defenders in what could wind up as a splitting of the party.
Since the hard-line elements constitute the bulk of the deadwood and sclerotic elements within the PAP, it is quite possible, given the outcome of this election, that reformists will gain control of the party and move to accommodate moderate opposition views in a grand coalition strategy designed to help preserve their hold on power after 2016.
But that is precisely why this election constitutes a pre-conditioning critical juncture that will set the stage for the next one. Processes of authoritarian regime liberalization tend to be "two-steps forward, one step backwards" affairs.
The regime opens a little, the opposition pushes further than what is acceptable to the regime, and the regime pushes back. Confronted with a rising tide of opposition success and grassroots mobilizations against one-party rule that cannot be contained with selective application of the ISA and the usual use of defamation and non-assembly laws, the PAP regime will therefore be forced to opt for one of two paths: repress or reform. Its previous preferred strategy of cooptation will no longer work.
This is important to consider because the reformists constitute a minority of the current PAP leadership. The PAP status quo--many of who have held their sinecures for more than a decade--control the levers of government and retain the loyalty of the armed forces (which have internal security and regime protection as well as external defense roles).
Thus, even if there are internal tensions within the armed forces between "professional" and "political" officers (the former focused on the technical merits of soldiering and the latter concerned with career advancement via political linkages), and its leadership sclerosis is profound, the PAP can, if it wants to, halt the process of social and political opening any time it wishes. Because it still has a reservoir of support in the so-called (ethnic Chinese) "heartland," the regime can push back without incurring major backlash.
This is not to say that there will not be any. Singaporeans are largely a passive and conformist society, so a move to repress or politically back-peddle will not be met with mass demonstrations akin to those of the Middle East today or Latin America in the
in the past.
But even if they acquiesce to the retrogression, the third generation of Singaporean voters will not consent to a return to the days of canings for jaywalking and imprisonment or bankruptcy for reasonable (unarmed) dissent. Instead, they will engage in passive resistance and low-level protests with increased grassroots mobilization over the internet, including social media and other hard-to-filter communications vehicles.
Since Singapore is an extremely "wired" society that depends on its telecommunications capabilities for much of its daily business, Chinese-style censorship will be very hard to maintain even though the government controls the telecommunications duopoly through which all internet access is filtered (I will not digress into the reaction of foreign actors to any such retrogression but suffice it to say that it will not be entirely supportive).
This means that the PAP is staring at the beginning of the end in this election. The opposition has organized, mobilized and taken advantage of the limited political space afforded to it by the manipulated electoral system. The PAP has reacted slowly and awkwardly to the opposition's energetic display. It therefore sits on the horns of a dilemma: accept that power sharing is inevitable over the short term and rotation in government office is quite possible within a few years (or at least much sooner than expected), or use its election victory to reassert its political supremacy, by force if necessary, over pretenders to its throne.
That will influence the context in which the power struggles following Lew Kuan Yew's death will occur, which in turn will determine whether or not the slow process of authoritarian liberalization will continue or be halted. At that point the moment of truth will have arrived for a country struggling with its identity as a modern bridge between East and West.
Paul G. Buchanan is the founder of Buchanan Strategic Advisors, Ltd., a New Zealand based political risk and market intelligence consultancy. From 2008 to 2011 he was a Visiting Associate Professor of Political Science at the National University of Singapore. An earlier version of this essay was published at Kiwipolitico
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I AM STILL VERY ANGRY BY LEE KUAN YEW'S THREAT TO ALJUNEDIANS THEY THEY WOULD 'LIVE AND REPENT' IF THEY VOTE FOR WORKER'S PARTY.
LKY is supposed to be an intelligent man and I cannot believe he can say something like that. He is no longer logical. He has definitely reached the stage of senility.
Voters don't take to threats easily because MM has always used threats and intimidation. Less people are frightened by him now than in the last election. And his threat that property prices in Aljunied will fall is stupid. In fact this time round, the PAP seems to be talking nonsense. 10 years ago, the opposition spoke a lot of nonsense. This time it is the PAP who is talking nonsense and the opposition are the ones making sense.BTW HDB statistics have shown that property prices in Hougang SMC and Potong Pasir SMC have risen over the years. See http://www.bernardleong.com/2011/05/01/are-property-prices-affected-by-who-you-vote-for/
Back to LKY 'live and repent' words. How dare Lee Kuan Yew USE THE USUAL THREATS AND INTIMIDATION to threaten that the Aljunied Constituency under Worker's Party will regret it for 5 years and they will finally repent? What is this? REPENTANCE IS ONY TO GOD FOR YOUR SINS. You don't repent to PAP who are MERELY HUMANS. Does PAP think they are gods so much so that Aljunedians will fall to their feet and repent?
George Yeo's free badges given out at Serangoon Stadium distorted the phrase in the US dollar bill 'IN GOD WE TRUST'. George Yeo's team changed the phrase into 'IN GEORGE WE TRUST'.
NOT ONLY ARE THE PAP now regarding themselves as gods, George Yeo is also assuming the position of a god.
THIS IS OUTRIGHT BLASPHEMY. -
Singaporeans have been repenting for the past 50 years.
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