“Kishore, Singapore would have no problems if Lee Kuan Yew were immortal. Alas he’s mortal.”
— Former deputy prime minister Goh Keng Swee, in conversation with Singapore’s ambassador to the UN Kishore Mahbubani
Singapore’s next election is likely to be held next month. The gerrymander has been refreshed and intensified; the leader of the main opposition party, Pritam Singh, has been convicted and fined S$14,000 on charges of having misled a parliamentary committee; another prominent member of an opposition party, Lee Hsien Yang (the former prime minister’s brother), has fled to Britain and been granted political asylum; and the ruling People’s Action Party’s unveiling of new candidates is nearly complete. From the government’s perspective, everything is good to go.
In many respects this will be an ordinary Singaporean election — the government will undoubtedly be returned with 85 to 95 per cent of parliamentary seats — but a host of features also make it distinctive.
Barring a last-minute surprise, the most obvious difference between this and any election since 1959 is that no member of the Lee family is either running as prime minister or lined up to be the next prime minister. Former PM Lee Hsien Loong has already handed the top job to his former secretary, Lawrence Wong and there is no younger member of the Lee family in parliament or cabinet.
Lee’s access to power is secure for the time being — he remains in cabinet as senior minister, a position his father once occupied — but his influence will wane without a relative waiting in the wings. Talented members of cabinet (and perhaps some whose self-confidence might be more obvious than their talent) will become increasingly unwilling to fall into line with yesterday’s man, and whatever plans Lee may have for a future beyond the premiership of Lawrence Wong must be considered contestable.
This situation leads directly to another unusual aspect of this election. Although the ruling party is not at risk of losing government, the prime minister may fall if the results or the campaign are worse than expected. The PAP’s last election campaign, in 2020, was run by deputy prime minister Heng Swee Keat, and was intended as his final step on the road to the prime ministership. But both the campaign and the result were so far below expectations that he eventually removed himself from the line of succession.
Given the PAP’s structural advantages, it seems unlikely that it will lose more seats than the ten it lost in 2020, but if it does, or if its share of the vote declines further from the 61 per cent it received in 2020, then the sharks will start circling Wong sooner rather than later.
It is undoubtedly for this reason that Wong has thrown himself so wholeheartedly into giving away government-sponsored shopping vouchers and other goodies. The government first deployed this overt style of pork-barrelling in a modest way in the 2020 election, but Wong has turbocharged it with the enthusiasm of a convert. We will have to wait and see if it works, but it is a sign of the government’s heightened level of insecurity that he feels the need to break so decisively with the legacy of founding prime minister Lee Kuan Yew, to whom populism and pork barrelling were anathema (and unnecessary).
This sense of desperation points to another, more basic element of novelty in this election: a series of self-inflicted embarrassments burdening the government’s image.
The most obvious is the fact that a former cabinet minister, S. Iswaran, was convicted in late 2024 on corruption charges for taking more than S$400,000 in “gifts” from a notorious businessman but served just four months in jail before starting a few months of home detention. (Whether it is the conviction or the short jail time that is the major point of embarrassment is a moot point.) Add to this a series of news stories about the luxury and wealth of some cabinet ministers, the former PM’s use of cabinet, parliament, the police and other arms of state power to pursue a private family dispute, and some spectacular mishandling of the domestic politics of the Gaza war, and you can see why they might be feeling a bit insecure.
Then there is the most recent own goal: the December 2024 revelation that the government had briefly authorised the release of everyone’s identity card number and other critical private details into the public domain. This was not a security breach by a hacker. It was part of a government plan to protect Singaporeans against identity theft that went disastrously wrong. Thus far no minister has been held to account.
The unavoidable truth is that Singapore has a B Team in charge and everyone knows it. It is this strand of self-awareness that has driven the government to reach deep into both the grab-bag of authoritarian repression and the toolkit of populist pork-barrel politics.
The problem at its most basic is that they don’t have a Lee Kuan Yew anymore. He stepped down from the premiership in 1990, stopped being a routine reference point in government sometime in the 2000s, retired from cabinet in 2011 and died in 2015 at the age of ninety-one.
It was Lee Kuan Yew who built Singapore’s system of “electoral authoritarianism” and was intimately involved in building and sustaining its uniquely successful system of state-directed capitalism. And it was Lee who kept both enterprises ticking over and in sync for decades. He was both a highly competent micro-manager and a political creature to his bones. They don’t make them like that anymore. He started in politics as a rabble rouser and master schemer who successfully destroyed an incumbent government in fair elections overseen by British colonial officials. He then turned on and destroyed the elements of his own party who were hostile to him and his close associates.
Regrettably, the complex system of elite regeneration that he also built has not been able to throw up anyone even close to his stature or acumen. No member of today’s cabinet was politically active before being nominated for parliament because being politically active, even in the PAP, would have been taken as showing poor judgement and unhealthy interests. Every member of today’s cabinet was presented with his or her position after being invited to a tea session with a group of senior ministers and put through a series of psychological tests, all of which was followed by a series of what are best described as job interviews.
These are retired civil servants, military bureaucrats (albeit flag-rank generals and admirals), doctors, lawyers, academics, bankers and business managers for whom entering politics was a logical, risk-free career move — the ultimate promotion. Little wonder that Lawrence Wong accepted the top job from Lee Hsien Loong by declaring, “I am ready for my next assignment.”
Lee Kuan Yew was a political force forged in fire, but today’s cabinet is a cossetted gaggle of paper pushers. The world needs paper pushers, of course, but not necessarily as national leaders. •
