Political leadership in Singapore : transitional reflections amidst the politics of bifurcation

Abstract

Singapore’s politics post-2011 is increasingly exhibiting symptoms of a bifurcation into two broad ‘paradigms’. Assuming that the result of the 2011 General Elections, when the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) garnered only 60.1 per cent of the vote — its lowest since fully competitive elections began in 1959 — represented a turnaround in the majority of Singaporeans’ willing embrace of the PAP’s policies and leaders, the political landscape appears headed towards a scenario of democratic pluralism. This is a landscape where a still inchoate ‘alternative ruling party’ might yet arise to challenge the PAP in a possible two-party system. The Workers’ Party emerged as the biggest winner amongst the opposition parties by picking up a four-member Group Representation Constituency (GRC) in Aljunied, while retaining its stronghold of a single member constituency in Hougang, earning a sum total of 12.8 per cent of the popular vote. The remaining 27.1 per cent of the vote was distributed amongst several other opposition parties who had won no formal seats under the first past the post electoral system. The three ‘non-constituency’ members of parliament allocated through the highest personal vote totals of the losing candidates amongst the opposition could hardly be considered as solid electoral gains since they appear more as constitutional gestures of political compensation. Hence, it is possible to posit that a bifurcation of political leadership pits two paradigms against one another. The first suggests that the prevailing pattern of the PAP’s parliamentary and electoral dominance, while under threat from a mostly disenchanted populace, is potentially resilient, as it had been after the party’s second worst showing in 1991, when the then-untried prime minister Goh Chok Tong attempted to secure a sizable mandate to demonstrate that he could command a level of support comparable to Lee Kuan Yew’s.