Las Vegas Review-Journal (Sunday)
Easy victory holds a warning for ruling party
Opposition increases Parliament presence
SINGAPORE — Singapore Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong’s long-governing party comfortably won Friday’s general elections as expected amid the coronavirus pandemic but faced a setback as the opposition made minor gains.
Lee said his People’s Action Party secured 83 parliamentary seats, keeping its overwhelming majority with 89 percent of the total seats, but its popular vote dipped to 61 percent. The Workers’ Party, the only opposition with a presence in Parliament, increased its seats from six to 10, the biggest victory for the opposition since independence.
It marked a decline in the PAP’s performance from 2015 polls when it took 93 percent of seats and nearly 70 percent of total vote. Several key PAP leaders also lost, including two former ministers.
“It’s not as strong a mandate as I hoped for, but it’s a good mandate,” Lee told a news conference. “The results reflect the pain and uncertainty that Singaporeans feel in this crisis. … This was not a feel-good election but one where people are facing real problems and expect more rough weather to come.”
The PAP has dominated politics since 1959, when Lee’s father, Lee
Kuan Yew, became Singapore’s first prime minister and built the resource-poor city-state into one of the world’s richest nations during 31 years in office. But it has been criticized for tight government control, media censorship and use of oppressive laws and civil lawsuits against dissidents.
The PAP is one of the world’s longest serving parties after those in China and North Korea.
Lee called the polls ahead of April, when his government’s mandate expires. Singapore’s vote follows recent elections in Serbia, Croatia and Mongolia and South Korea in April, when governing parties in all of those countries scored resounding victories.
“In the Singapore context, this is a defeat (for PAP),” said Bridget Welsh, honorary research associate at Malaysia’s University of Nottingham. “Worst seat performance and loss of popular vote in an election that they called early in a pandemic mistakenly thinking the crisis would help them.”
“The PAP has a mandate but one that puts the party on notice that Singaporeans, especially young Singaporeans, expect more,” she said.
The outcome threw Lee’s plan to retire in two years at age 70 into uncertainty. His designated successor and deputy, Heng Swee Keat, won his seat with a slim majority.
Lee, who has ruled since 2004, vowed Saturday to navigate Singapore through the virus crisis. “I’m determined to hand over Singapore intact and in good working order to the next,” he said.
He acknowledged that citizens, especially the younger generation, want more opposition voices in Parliament. He said Workers’ Party chief Pritam Singh officially will be named opposition leader, an unprecedented move in the citystate. Two more non-constituency seats will be offered to top opposition losers to bring the opposition block to 12 seats, as provided for under the law, he said.
“Today’s results are positive, but we have to hit the ground running. We should not get over our head with the results,” Singh said.
Weeks ago, Singapore emerged from a two-month lockdown aimed at controlling one of Asia’s worst coronavirus outbreaks. The tiny nation of 5.8 million people has reported more than 45,000 cases, most of them foreign workers living in crowded dormitories that were overlooked in the early phase of its crisis management.