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Singapore.
Singapore’s voters gave the ruling party a “major wake-up call” in weekend
elections, with critics feeling more and more empowered and no longer afraid to
speak up for change, analysts said on Sunday.
The results
of Saturday’s presidential vote, in which Tony Tan, seen as a proxy for the
People’s Action Party, scraped to victory, showed the government needed to
evolve and be more open if it wanted to stay in power.
The vote
was essentially a spillover of the voter discontent seen in May, when the opposition
made a historic breakthrough in legislative elections and prompted Prime
Minister Lee Hsien Loong to reshuffle his cabinet, they said.
“It’s an
indication that support for the PAP is not so strong,” said Reuben Wong, an
assistant political science professor at the National University of Singapore,
after results showed Tan secured just over 35 percent of the vote.
“They have
to figure out whether they need to reorient themselves away from the old-school
authoritarian conservative PAP towards something that’s more mainstream
Singapore, more liberal, more plural, more open to different ideas.”
Bridget
Welsh, a political science professor at the Singapore Management University,
described the result as “another major wake-up call for the PAP.”
“Tony Tan
is the PAP of old, tied to LKY and its conservative roots,” she said, referring
to Lee Kuan Yew, the stern founding father of modern Singapore and its first
prime minister.
“The PAP
has to shed its LKY skin and evolve into a less authoritarian animal that all
Singaporeans can connect to.”
Former
deputy prime minister Tan, 71, only narrowly escaped defeat after a recount
early Sunday gave him a margin of just 7,269 votes over his closest opponent
out of more than two million valid ballots cast.
Nearly 65
percent of voters cast their ballots for candidates who had been critical of
the PAP.
Song Seng
Wun, a Singapore-based economist with financial group CIMB, said the scale of
the vote against Tan in the four-way race for the largely ceremonial post was
significant.
“Only one
in three voters chose the winner who is closely associated with the government.
Two out of three chose somebody else and that’s quite telling.”
“It shows
that the stranglehold of the PAP is no longer as firm as it was in the last
four decades,” he told AFP.
Although
the presidency is seen as a non-political role, the poll was seen as a direct
referendum on the PAP, which has ruled Singapore for 52 years, because of Tan’s
close links with the party and its top leaders.
Song said
that the number of people who believed that “the PAP knows best” was declining
and the younger generation, who have increasingly making their voices heard
through the Internet, were pushing the boundaries.
“You now
have a growing group of people with greater political awareness and maturity
who are no longer afraid to speak up,” Song added.
Facebook,
YouTube and Twitter have been credited with helping the younger generation
bypass restrictions of a pro-government media as the wealthy city state evolves
from strict political control to a more open democracy.
Under the
PAP, Singapore has risen rapidly to become one of Asia’s wealthiest societies
and Singaporeans had a gross domestic product of nearly $50,000 per capita in
2010, one of the highest in the world.
Critics,
however, say that economic growth has come at the expense of certain political
freedoms, and there is a general reluctance to question policies because the
government supposedly knows best.
But rising
living costs, soaring housing prices, a widening income gap and a liberal
policy on foreign workers blamed for jobs being taken from locals have
galvanized support for the opposition.
The PAP
lost an unprecedented six seats out of the 87 at stake in May’s general
election and its share of the vote fell to an all-time low of 60 percent from
nearly 67 percent in the previous election in 2006.
Song said
that faced with a politically more mature population, the PAP would have to
shed its “we know best” image.
“The
process of engagement going forward must also change because the kid is not a
kid anymore,” he said.
Agence France-Presse
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Singapore's
former deputy prime minister Tony Tan waves to his
supporters at the Toa Payoh Stadium after being voted as the President of Singapore on Aug. 28, 2011. Tan won 35.19 percent of the votes cast in Singapore in the polls on Saturday, in the race of four contestants. Tony Tan will be sworn in as president on Sept. 1 for a term of six years. (Xinhua/Then Chih Wey) |
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