• Garry Rodan

10 May 2006Despite strong economic growth, election handouts and law suits against opposition candidates, the ruling party lost support last Saturday, writes Garry Rodan




SINGAPORE prime minister Lee Hsien Loong can rightly claim a strong mandate after leading the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) to another emphatic victory in Saturday’s general election. The government secured all but two of the 84 seats in parliament and took 66.6 per cent of the votes cast.



But that still means one-third of Singaporeans rejected the PAP in spite of impressive economic growth, seductive election-eve budget handouts and a host of constraints on opposition parties. The government saw its share of the vote fall by 8.7 percentage points compared with the last elections in 2001. Singapore’s two opposition MPs - Chiam See Tong of the Singapore Democratic Alliance (SDA) and Low Thia Khiang of the Workers’ Party (WP) - were returned with increased majorities, despite concerted attempts to unseat them.



Mixed as the results are for the PAP, one election outcome gives it cause for unqualified satisfaction: the rejection of the Singapore Democratic Party (SDP) at the polls. This is more than an issue of one opposition party’s demise. It is the nature of opposition that the SDP represents which the PAP seeks to expunge from the Singaporean political system.



The PAP has long been disparaging about political opposition, depicting it as a distraction at best to good government. This was reiterated during the recent election campaign. Reflecting on the existing opposition MPs, Prime Minister Lee observed: “We can deal with them. Suppose you had 10, 15, 20 opposition members in parliament. Instead of spending my time thinking what is the right policy for Singapore, I’m going to spend all my time thinking what’s the right way to fix them, to buy my supporters’ votes, how can I solve this week’s problem and forget about next year’s challenges?”



However, different forms of opposition attract different degrees of hostility from the PAP. Under the leadership of Secretary-General Chee Soon Juan, the SDP has engaged in the most explicit questioning of PAP values and ideologies, and has challenged the PAP on fundamental issues of transparency and accountability. Mr Chee and the SDP have also embarked on extra-electoral strategies of public protests and civil disobedience to highlight the administrative and legal impediments to free speech that undermine genuine political competition in the city-state.



The SDP entered this election with the stated intention of scrutinising the government’s handling of a controversy involving the National Kidney Foundation charity. The NKF had been exposed in the Singaporean media for its extravagance over its chief executive’s S$600,000 (US$384,000) annual salary and first-class air tickets, and discrepancies over the public disclosure of the size of its reserves. While the NKF is not a state body, the SDP tried to use the NKF fiasco to bolster its argument for more transparency and accountability in government-linked companies and statutory authorities. It sought to challenge the PAP team headed by Minister of Health Khaw Boon Wan in the constituency of Sembawang, which elects six MPs. But the SDP’s campaign had barely got off the ground when its 12 central executive committee members found themselves facing defamation suits from Prime Minister Lee and his father, Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew. The Lees allege that an SDP newsletter depicts them and the government as withholding information about the NKF and perpetuating a corrupt political system for the benefit of the political elite.



Thereafter, the NKF issue effectively disappeared from the campaign and the state-controlled media echoed the PAP’s denunciation of the SDP more generally. The SDP secured just 23.3 per cent of the vote in Sembawang. The party’s Ling How Doong, a former MP who contested the seat of Bukit Panjang, suffered the heaviest loss of the election, with just 22.8 per cent of the vote. There is now a serious prospect that pending court cases will kill off the SDP altogether. Cases by PAP leaders against their political opponents have never failed. The SDP has no funds to deal with the scale of damages that could be awarded in the pending cases against Mr Chee and his sister Chee Siok Chin, the only two of the twelve-member committee who have yet to apologise and arrange to settle out of court.



Although the PAP finds the SDP especially objectionable, it still left no stone unturned in battling the other opposition parties. Former Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong was assigned a special role in assisting PAP candidates trying to win back the seats of Potong Pasir and Hougang, held by Messrs Chiam and Low respectively. The PAP renewed threats of lower state funding for upgrading housing estates in these two constituencies if it lost, and offered expansive upgrading programs if it won. This included S$80 million for Potong Pasir and S$100 million for Hougang. Despite this, Messrs Chiam and Low saw their share of the vote increase - in Mr. Chiam’s case to 55.8 per cent from 52.4 per cent, and in Mr. Low’s case to 62.7 per cent from 55.0 per cent. That led Prime Minister Lee to declare that “we will review our strategy for approaching these two constituencies over the next five years”. But whether that will lead to a serious acceptance of political pluralism is another matter.



By far and away the most creditable overall performance among opposition parties came from the WP. Apart from Mr. Low’s victory, the WP scored well in the five-member constituency of Aljunied, where it secured 43.9 per cent of the vote. Overall, it obtained an average of 38.4 per cent of the votes in the seats it contested - 6 per cent better than the SDA and 15 per cent better than the SDP. On Sunday morning, Prime Minister Lee positively contrasted the WP with the SDP, noting that the former had improved since its previous leader J.B. Jeyaretnam stepped down in 2001 - after being bankrupted by law suits. He also observed that it had fielded better quality candidates and was rewarded accordingly.



However, the WP came to the polls with a 52-page manifesto containing a range of policy prescriptions relating to Singapore’s mounting material inequalities. Much of the nine-day election campaign was consumed by controversies over defamation cases and attacks by the PAP on the character and integrity of opposition figures. This reduced the scope for debate over the WP’s calls for a minimum wage and an “unconditional needs-based safety net” and other substantive differences over coping with globalisation. The PAP rejects such a direction, but it has yet to deliver an effective alternative to protect the interests of those Singaporeans who feel they have not shared in the fruits of the city-state’s economic growth. This may explain why as many as one-third voted for opposition parties, despite their obvious limitations. •



Garry Rodan is director of the Asia Research Centre and professor of politics and international studies at Murdoch University. This article first appeared in the Wall Street Journal.



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