Worker's Party

There is this astounding statistic that the WP won more than half of the votes that it contested for. They contested for 21 seats and won 10. They were, far and away the most successful opposition party. The opposition landscape is beginning to shape up such that there are three tiers. On the top tier, there was only the WP. Then there was the SDP and the PSP on the second tier. And then everybody else on the third.

There was an interview where Brian Eno said that in music, it's less about the genius of the individual, and more about the genius of the entire scene. Looking at WP, I'd have to say that there's something about that. WP had gone from strength to strength. In the year 2001, the opposition parties were at their nadir. Singaporeans had rejected them completely. Apparently that was the time when it made the pivotal transition from JB Jeyaretnam being the leader to Low Thia Khiang. It was also around that time when Sylvia Lim was recruited.

2006 was a time when Sylvia Lim and Low Thia Khiang were the co-leaders of the party. We didn't know it yet, but there was a sea change. There were some opposition party members whose mentality was to get a seat and break the monopoly of the PAP system, and they had a more confrontational and adversarial style when dealing with the PAP. The old school opposition members Chee Soon Juan and JB Jeyaretnam were like that. Francis Seow was like that. Chiam See Tong and Low Thia Khiang were different, they were not in parliament mainly to oppose the PAP, but rather act as a constraint against some of its more extreme tendencies. They were quite happy to play ball a lot of the time, and they represented a more moderate style of politics.

In a way Low Thia Khiang represented a kind of a revolution in opposition party politics because he was some kind of a reset button, and at the same time, he was determined to push his party to evolve into a grassroots movement, rather than a rebel stronghold. Times were changing, and opposition parties were no longer treated like they were some kind of plague.

This evolution finally gained some traction during the 2011 election, when Worker's Party went from Low Thia Khiang being the only electable personality to having an all-star lineup for Aljunied. They got Pritam Singh and Chen Show Mao on board, and took a very calculated gamble that Hougang would always prove to be a Worker's Party stronghold. The Worker's Party eked out a narrow victory, but their opponents were heavyweights. On one hand, George Yeo, Lim Hwee Hua, Ong Ye Kung and Zainul Abidin Rasheed represented some of the finest the PAP had to offer, but all of this was rejected in favour of opposition representation.

There were a few others who were older, and who had been around the block. Maybe there was an element of bittersweet when all the people from the “old opposition” had to reckon with their mantle being taken over. There may have been an element of resentment from the elders towards the younger members, who tended to be from a more privileged background than the older generation. There may have been this undercurrent that the older batch were around during the lean and tough times when being an opposition party member made you a pariah. And yet when spring came, they weren't around to reap the benefits.

Well, this problem turned out to be relatively easy to fix. Worker's party was a place where everybody had to pay their dues before they got anywhere. Everybody had to volunteer and help out and do all the grunt work. Even Chen Show Mao, the closest example of a guy that Low Thia Khiang might have regretted recruiting, was shown helping out with random stuff during the 2020 campaign.

The Worker's Party focused ruthlessly on grassroots movement and solving its town council issues during these days. It hardly had anything to say about policy. The main idea was to get an army of volunteers to walk the ground, to focus on campaigning and getting in touch with the people. The idea was to achieve some kind of electoral success, and then leverage on that electoral success to attract the best people, but also the best people who were willing to devote massive amounts of time and effort to serve.

It helped that they had amongst their ranks a few ladies who were easy on the eye, but they definitely had character. It was unusual for the Worker's Party to take in somebody who had already made their name while in another party, but quite likely Nicole Seah fit into some kind of mould at the Worker's Party, plus she was young and willing to start from scratch. People had charisma. They were likeable, personable and relatable. They were open to new ideas, and yet at the same time they understood a little of what it meant to be hip and trendy. Many of them were millennials.

Perhaps the way that it absorbed Nicole Seah was instructive. Nicole Seah was a member of the Reform Party, and that was back when it seemed like Kenneth Jeyaretnam might be a great figure of the opposition the way that JB Jeyaretnam was. Apparently a large swarth of people cut ties with KJ a few months before the elections and the mass exodus landed up in National Solidarity Party, which fielded a large number of candidates in 2011, even though relatively few of them managed to distinguish themselves. Nicole Seah was one of the standout stars, and she proved to be a very talented campaigner, and very quickly became a political star. But her life after the elections had a lot of ups and downs. She made a mistake – albeit an understandable one – by endorsing Tan Jee Say for the presidential elections. It was a tragedy because he got involved in a four cornered fight and drew enough votes away from Tan Cheng Bock that he lost narrowly to Tony Tan. Then Nicole Seah disappeared to Bangkok, and later on, by her own account, had a breakdown, because she was trying to do too many things, and they were not successful. Or she had a few unhappy relationships. She wrote a note to her supporters, and told them that she had to go away from politics for the time being. A lot of us were disappointed at the time, but in hindsight, she did exactly the right thing. She needed some time away, she needed to live a normal life and grow up like a normal person.

And all these years, she had embedded herself into the Worker's Party system, going from being a big fish in the NSP pond to start from zero, in the rank and file of the Worker's Party, and working her way through the system. Of course she had the qualities to succeed, but she had to pay her dues to do so. And sometimes I wonder how much she contributed to the media savviness of the Worker's Party's 2020 elections. It was our pandemic election, and suddenly having a great social media campaign turned out to have a so much greater impact on the success on the entire campaign.

Because this was no longer 2011, when Facebook was just primed to take over the world. We are living in a time when social media was not merely some hobby that you had, but the way that a great many of us directly experience reality.

So you had various people who were groomed through the Worker's Party system. You had Leon Pereira and Gerald Giam, who always stood on the fringes of the system, serving terms as NCMP before they came in through the main door by taking the Aljunied places vacated by Chen Show Mao and Low Thia Khiang.

A cautionary word: Low Thia Khiang may have participated in all the general elections from 1988 to 2015, and then finished serving his term in 2020. But even he's not going to last forever. Being an opposition MP takes a lot out of you. Chiam See Tong became a shell of a man after suffering a stroke. Low Thia Khiang ended up in the ICU earlier this year. Careers at the Worker's Party don't tend to last very long. Yaw Shing Leong could have been a rising star, but he was outed as an adulterer. Daniel Goh and Lee Li Lian came and went. The upshot is that you could spend years to build up your name and reputation, but you might end up not staying the course. This is in stark contrast to PAP people who take senior positions in the government and make a lifelong career out of it while still being a member of parliament. It makes succession planning rather tricky in the case of WP.

Sometimes I wonder why the Worker's Party chose light blue for their uniform. I'm starting to understand. The PAP wore white, but that was an unfortunate colour. It was originally meant to symbolise purity and freedom from corruption. But there were other connotations to the colour white. It could represent collusion with the white men, considering that the PAP decided to steer Singapore so closely with the west. It could represent some form of regality. And given that white is also the colour of funeral garb in Chinese culture, there was this element of “don't fuck with us”. Since white was the school uniform of the most elite school in Singapore, Raffles Institution, it could represent association with the elite. Real Madrid's white uniform stood for regality. Leeds copied the white uniform, but it stood for a form of toughness.

On the other hand, light blue is a more friendly and welcoming colour. It could represent blue collar, as opposed to white collar, which appeals either to the champagne socialists amongst us, or the working class. I also noticed that they might have adopted “Ai Biah jia eh Yah” as their unofficial anthem. It sends a message – Worker, work ethic. “Ai Biah jia eh Yah” is almost universally regarded as the unofficial anthem of the working class in Singapore – you must fight / hustle to get ahead. It was either grim or inspiring, depending on how you saw it. Light blue was friendly, it was the same colour as the smurfs, or grover. It was a happy and calm colour.

When the Worker's Party revealed their introductory video, I wonder why they devoted an entire section to their photographer. And it turned out that his photography series was so crucial to the operation of their online campaign. And the strange thing about that video was that it included Cheryl Loh and Lee Li Lian, who ended up not campaigning. It included Kenneth Foo, who might have been a breakout star if not for the fact that Heng Swee Keat basically stamped out their hopes in East Coast GRC before the elections had even begun.

There's no doubt right now that the Worker's Party had run a brilliant campaign. I'm not sure what their campaign was like in 2015. They also ran a brilliant campaign in 2011. They introduced a few phrases that had become memorable. Their slogan was “towards a world class parliament”. They introduced the concept of Worker's Party being a co-driver, less an adversary than a friend with good intentions, who was there to slap the driver if he went astray. (The slap was an allusion to the infamous rumour that a younger and more impetuous Lee Hsien Loong had slapped a cabinet colleague, and infamously, his colleagues refused to debunk the rumour). The campaign began with an electrifying bait and switch: Low Thia Khiang had moved from Hougang to Aljunied to try and claim a GRC. He said, 明知山有虎，偏向虎山行.

I'm not sure what 2015 was like, but in retrospect, it was that most crucial of all elections. Notwithstanding that he was on a roll with triumphs in three straight elections – Aljunied in 2011, Hougang in 2012 and Punggol East in 2013, he knew that this was the time to lie low and dig in, and very crucially, he eked out a win in Aljunied.

In retrospect, this was crucial, because it gave him a platform on which Pritam Singh could steer the Worker's Party to greater heights in this 2020 election. Their triumph in this election has to be seen in this light, it can never be taken for granted, and their success was not certain because up till the reporting of the results, some people were still thinking that they could be “wiped out” ie, they could lose all their seats in parliament. I remember thinking that it would be a shame if they ran such a good campaign and they got wiped out. It turned out that they didn't.

Another way of looking at the election results was this: the Worker's Party polled more votes than the PAP when it was contesting. In essence this was a mini by-election where 4 GRCs and 2 SMCs were contested. The wards that the PAP won had Heng Swee Keat, Sun Xueling and Tan Chuan Jin to anchor them. And the PAP lost the other three.

Charles Chong could have been part of the Sengkang team, but he retired. Koh Poh Koon could have won Punggol East against Lee Li Lian, but he didn't. The PAP should have taken Sengkang more seriously, but they had this attitude that they were folding a district that was leaning WP (Punggol East) into more friendly PAP territory, which is not a good assumption to make. It's precisely that Sengkang GRC was created because Sengkang West was growing so rapidly, so you had no idea what was the political affiliation of all the new residents. And they were about to find out.

I don't know what Ng Chee Meng was like as a parliamentarian, or as the representative of his people, if he did go on walkabouts. There were mutterings, for sure. He was voted in for 2015, and parachuted in to be a new full minister. Weirdly enough, he was given half the transport portfolio and half the education portfolio, and they might have been fast tracking him to more senior positions. And equally weirdly, he was taken off both of these portfolios before two years was up, and assigned to NTUC labour chief. Which is kinda unsettling. Was this the guy that they wanted to defend Sengkang from the WP? In any case, he failed.

Perhaps people were sore at Lam Pin Min at his role in getting PMDs banned.

The WP team who made up the Sengkang slate were newbies, but they quickly became famous. There was a televised TV debate where Jamus stood up to Vivian Balakrishnan. (Some people were wondering why they sent a guy who was from the old guard in). He Tingru proved to be an adept campaigner and a likeable person, plus the story that she met Terence Tan when they were campaigning in GE 2015 and ended up marrying each other was a heartwarming story. Raeesah was just supposed to be your 20-something who had actually done something with her life, like setting up a foundation to help Rohingya refugees. Unexpectedly, she became the eye of a storm when one or two barbed comments she made on facebook 2 years earlier came to light. Pritam Singh decided to stand by her, correctly judging a mountain being made of a molehill in this incident, while the PAP desperately tried to attack her. The result was that #IStandWithRaeesah became a trending hashtag.

Perhaps the PAP were slow to recognise this, but the Sengkang campaign became the focal centre of the election, rather unexpectedly, considering that the WP slate of candidates there were relatively unknown. But WP seemed to understand that what social media campaigns do well – do very well is to make a group of young people very very famous in a very very short period of time. The PAP don't seem to have caught on to this. Nobody knows exactly whether Jamus is a brilliant economist, whether he's up to the level of a Yeoh Lam Keong or a Donald Low. But he's smarter than your average bear and smarter than you, and has an appealing enthusiasm. He Tingru is a Cambridge graduate and somehow it seems hardly necessary to hammer this point home.

To be sure, the WP strategy doesn't really scale up. You can concentrate all your fire on Sengkang. I think that's why they only decided to field 21 candidates. Unless you find some way of broadcasting a different social media campaign to people of different constituencies, the crude way is to train all your fire on one GRC, and it just seems to me that for whatever reason the WP chose Sengkang.

But now that they have Sengkang as well, it's different. There will be the mentality that Sengkang can be won back, just like Punggol East was won back quickly after it fell to the WP. The PAP will not treat Sengkang like a lost cause, a permanent concession to Aljunied or Hougang or Potong Pasir back in the day, a place to train up their B-listers for possible promotion to the first team should a by election come along.

The Sengkang town council can be sued for any irregularity, the Aljunied town council likewise. And I don't know if the office of the leader of the opposition comes with some hidden snares here or there.

One thing that is striking is the low number of candidates that the WP has. Maybe they recognise that they have an operation that doesn't scale up easily. What the WP did with Aljunied in 2011 and then Sengkang in 2020 can't be replicated on a larger scale. There will be a time when their strategy will hit its natural ceiling. They'll have to evolve, but for now, it worked brilliantly.

In fact, people were wondering why they let Jamus Lim have all the oxygen instead of Nicole Seah. The first answer, and the obvious one, was that Jamus was the economist, and probably the wonkiest of the lot. But the other answer is that any oxygen that Nicole Seah took up would be oxygen deprived to the Sengkang team. They had to train all their fire on Sengkang and let Nicole Seah be more low key for the time being, and count on Nicole Seah being gracious enough to take a hit for the team. It would not be great for her to lose East Coast GRC. But for WP to win GRC would provoke a controversy that would overshadow that triumph. It's one thing to unseat George Yeo, who's probably hit his ceiling with a foreign minister, who probably would ascent to deputy prime minister but no further. It's quite another thing to oust a designated successor to the prime minister and disrupt a national plan. Neutrals would be quite outraged.

If the WP were greedy, then they might pump for Marine Parade, but Tan Chuan Jin would be hard to unseat. Nicole Seah vs Sun Xueling would be an interesting duel, but Nicole Seah is actually better as part of a team. She could be the PR face and the other guys in her team are the people who have more heft, the serious bureaucrats who have more accomplished careers. It's tough running in an SMC. It's a very intriguing question why Nicole Seah wasn't sent to duel with Sun Xueling, but my gut feel is that the WP put an equal wager on East Coast and Sengkang. They were quite prepared to push both forward, but their East Coast plan was thwarted by Heng Swee Keat. Thereafter, their plan had to be, they wanted to win Sengkang and lose East Coast as narrowly as they possibly could. After that, I don't really know how they could generate more buzz for their candidates down the line.

In the elections, WP have usually prized quality over quantity. They are thought of as the most successful opposition party, but in 2011, NSP contested more seats and in this elections, PSP contested more seats. WP relies on volunteer work, but I don't really know how the execution and planning of the virtual campaigns will cost. I'm sure that the people behind these campaigns will make their name and move on – this is the classic example of “exposure”, and at least this is not just an excuse for an employer to lowball you because there's a good chance your work will be seen by the whole country.

It's only after Heng Swee Keat beat Nicole Seah and company in the East Coast GRC elections, that I realised that instead of it being a desperate move, it was a pretty good strategy. Tampines GRC seemed to be a stronghold when it was Heng Swee Keat's constituency, and maybe that's why the Worker's Party wouldn't impinge upon it. But now, it has to be seen to be up for grabs, and I'm sure that there will be quite a few interesting conversations between the WP and the NSP about whether Tampines could be ceded.

What's the strategy going forward for the WP? East Coast GRC has thrown a curve ball into their plans. But what we've learnt is that PAP politicians come and go. I recall that Tampines GRC was not competitive in 2011, when Heng Swee Keat was making his debut and the anchor guy there was Mah Bow Tan. Now there is Baey Yam Keng and Masagos Zukifli, and presumably the Worker's Party didn't want to make incursions in there because they thought that Heng Swee Keat was going to be there. And maybe in the next elections, the PAP's hold on Tampines could be shaky and it could be ripe for the taking again. Likewise, in Pasir Ris Punggol, nobody really knows how much longer Teo Chee Hean is going to serve. Jalan Besar was won handily by the PAP. It might even be a PAP stronghold, but Josephine Teo is the most senior minister in that ward, and that's why it looks a little shaky. And if the WP people didn't mind walking a little more, they could go check out Mountbatten. Toa Payoh and Potong Pasir are also adjacent to the Worker's Party empire.

So there's the problem with the Worker's Party: they could flip over the easy pickings near to their traditional northeast. They don't actually have the entire island-wide reach. The PAP could always strengthen the GRCs near to the northeast, and make it hard for the Worker's Party to expand, and the Worker's Party would have to reach out to areas that are crawled by other opposition parties and start persuading them to please let us have a go. Then again, it could be possible that the opposition parties might start dying off.

Or the WP might not even need to look for new turf, but simply look to hold on to their 2 GRCs – which is a difficult enough task – and double down on Marine Parade.

Now, thus far, I've been trying to outline how best WP can divide the turf for the next election round, but there are plenty of uncertainty. Certainly the 2015 GE was an elections which bucked quite a few trends. The Hougang and Punggol East by elections seemed to signify that the trend was shifting towards the WP, and that was misleading. And then it seemed that the situation was closer to 2006 rather than 2011... we were wrong again. So it behooves the WP to make a wide range of responses to a wide range of possibilities. At the same time, the thrust of this writeup is to talk about how WP could expand the number of seats won in parliament. There is the deeper question of whether a higher number of seats for the opposition is really a good thing, that happens for good reasons. That'll have to be addressed separately.

Another thing to note is this: the WP has grown from strength to strength from – to take a convenient baseline, 2001 or even 2011. 2001 was when the party control was passed from JBJ to Low Thia Khiang, and when LTK started to put his stamp on the party. In 2011, the sight that the party was more than just Low Thia Khiang seemed like a novelty. We were introduced to characters like Pritam Singh, Lee Li Lian, Chen Show Mao, Png Eng Huat, Yee Jenn Jong, Sylvia Lim (actually SL was already prominent in 2006) and Gerald Giam. This was a display of strength, because it wasn't just a rag tag bunch of Tom Dick and Harrys with some kind of axe to grind against the establishment. These were your regular middle class guys who might even have aspired to a PAP seat. But they lent their efforts to Worker's Party. Perhaps they felt that WP wouldn't shackle their range of movement the way that the PAP did. Perhaps they felt that the PAP were never going to change for the better the way they hoped that it would. The point is that the PAP used to have a huge advantage in recruiting politicians over the other opposition parties, and that advantage is being whittled away.

The myth that the opposition parties could not attract enough good people to run for parliament was busted in a big way. I would say that that was one of the big legacies of the 2011 election, and why it was considered a watershed. But there was more to come. In 2015, the Worker's Party were able to add Leon Perera, Daniel Goh, Terence Tan, Dennis Tan and He Tingru. And in the 2020, they added Nicole Seah, Raeesah Khan and Jamus Lim. In short, they don't seem to have a problem adding people to their roster. They've not had a major scandal since the Yaw Shin Leong incident, and it's just as well that Yaw Shin Leong has left town, because he's managed to turn both the PAP and the WP against him. It's true that the PAP has a tougher job of finding 93 good people, that's much much harder than finding 21 of them.

Basically, the opposition MPs are backbenchers. They have a higher profile than the PAP backbenchers because of their prominence, but they don't have to be office holders or ministers quite yet. That is truly the great leap forward. How do we know that they're going to be up to the task? We actually don't! Of course, one could say that Lee Kuan Yew and company did a really good job, considering they weren't experienced either. But they were taking over a country that was much smaller than it is today. The downside of a democracy is that a person running a dynasty is often groomed all his life to assume a role. The WP might not have that. I don't really know how much they'll be talking to the civil servants, at this rate.

It's nice to see all the scenes of jubilation. I think that the WP are still somewhat short of being able to run this country, obviously. Consider that Goh Chok Tong and Lee Hsien Loong had to be prepared for years... what if the leader of the opposition would one day come in as PM... it's going to be a truly rough ride.

2020 Elections - the campaign

This elections took place under a more grim mood. Unemployment was staggering. Everybody was shut up in their houses. There would not be a party atmosphere. This would be the third elections in the new normal. If 2011 was “A New Hope”, then 2015 was “Empire Strikes Back”. But it's unclear what 2020 is going to be like. All three elections were pretty unusual from the pre-2011 elections, and in their own way. 2011 was a strange beast, but it was probably an election that you went through with rose coloured lens, and that only tends to happen only once. You only get one chance at first love, and the next time around, the opposition parties will no longer be angels from heaven: you will see them as real people, warts and all.

There was a lot of talk about the significance of the 2011 election. There were some people who thought that it was the dawn of a more democratic Singapore, and remember, this was before 2016, so we saw this as unequivocally a good thing. All the hopes of more opposition advancement came to a thudding halt from GE 2015 onwards. That was the beginning of the Aljunied Town Council lawsuits. Also, the media tended to give the impression that the Worker's Party were not speaking up enough in parliament. Chen Show Mao wasn't going to be the star that people hoped him to be. The Worker's Party had taken their next step forward, but this was going to be growing pains.

When there was talk about the opposition forming one bloc that could take on the PAP, people talked about “opposition unity”. And during the 2011 elections, the opposition parties did their best to put up a united front. Perhaps they thought they could emulate the success of the Worker's Party. But as time went on, it soon became clear that only the Worker's Party were ever going to win seats in parliament, and even then, very few of them. Chiam See Tong, for all his virtues, was basically an independent. He probably didn't know how to build a party.

So the opposition was divided between the Worker's Party, who, well, worked hard to build themselves into a force that could plausibly contend for parliament. I don't know how the rest of the parties were going to perform. Certainly there were many more people who were just happy to form parties of their own. Any johnny come lately who wanted to campaign certainly showed up. And it was just up to the party leaders to make sure that they ran in places that didn't overlap each other. There was Kenneth Jeyaretnam who stoically tries to keep the memory of his father alive, even though we thought that he should have packed it up a long time ago. There were people from the days gone past – Singapore Democratic Alliance, Singapore people's Party. National Solidarity Party, and who knows what those insignia mean anymore. This was one weird election, where there were as many as 11 parties taking part. There was even a Singaporeans First Party but it got disbanded, and their members all were asked to seek to join other parties to campaign.

Then there were the parties which had a little more visibility. There was the Singapore Democratic Party, which was notable only because Chee Soon Juan had been around for long enough to almost become respectable. Somehow, he managed to get Paul Tambyah to believe in him and lend some respectabilty. He managed to get that opportunitst Tan Jee Say back into the fold, but as usual, that will prove to be a marriage of convenience this time around, instead of what it looked like in 2011 – a huge unprecedented coup. This time around, Paul Tambyah was standing for elections in a single seat ward, and he has a very real chance of getting elected.

There was the Progress Singapore Party, which had two figures that people would recognise: Tan Cheng Bock and Lee Hsien Yang. That was the grudge party. To be sure, Tan Cheng Bock was one of the best campaigners that the PAP ever had, and he knew how to win the hearts of his voters, and he was enough of a maverick to have some semblance of independence from the PAP. And naturally, he would join up with Lee Hsien Yang, who was Lee Hsien Loong's brother-turned-adversary over the Oxley Road saga. They had in their ranks Brad Bower, who was the random Caucasian turned Singaporean who had interesting questions to ask about how sovereign wealth funds were managed.

One little twist that never really got mentioned very much was how and why Michelle Lee and Ravi Philemon ended up breaking off and forming another political party with a hipster name – Red Dot United? My guess would be that if Michelle Lee stayed with Progress Singapore, she would have to put in a lot of effort into campaigning and walking the ground, whereas here she could just walk the ground and campaign.

And last but not least, there was the Worker's Party. It's never been hard for them to get the cream of the crop of people who wanted to contest in the elections. They are the one party where I could name up to 20 of their stalwarts over the last 20 years. Nicole Seah will probably no longer get as much attention this time around, as opposed to 2011 when she was Singapore's Sweetheart for around 2 weeks. But this time, it almost seems as though she left a legacy in her party.

The Worker's Party fielded more female candidates this time around, and quite a few of them resembled her: pleasant on the eye, high on relatability, but also projecting an image of seriousness. They recruited a young policy wonk, Jamus Lim, who presented himself so well in a straight debate that he became the breakout star of this elections. But some of the real stars of the show this time was the media team. The pictures that the Worker's Party put out in this elections are worthy of Leni Riefenstahl.

The Worker's Party might do very well on social media, but as in all elections, the world of social media is not the same as the electorate.

There was the Raeesah Khan incident, where somebody dug up old comments by her about how the system was tilted against minorities. It shouldn't have been said in public but equally, somebody has to point out these things every now and then.

There was the Heng Swee Keat incident, where what set tongues wagging was the last minute transfer of Heng Swee Keat from Tampines to East Coast. People were talking about, why was the PM designate sent into a difficult GRC, if not all was well within the cabinet. If you had already decided on Heng being the next PM, then why does he have to be the one to move? What would it mean if he couldn't win big in his constituency?

There were the POFMAs issued against Paul Tambyah and Chee Soon Juan. People were wondering if it went overboard. There was the incident of Tan Wu Meng criticising Pritam Singh and Alfian.

At the time that the elections were held, the conventional wisdom was that the Worker's Party would hold on to Aljunied and Hougang, and improve from 2015 by a small amount. Or the opposition could be wiped out in a clean sweep. Maybe this was a case of the bookies trying to influence the results? The election season seemed to be a nasty and unentertaining one, and people were just expecting that the Singapore populace would simply vote like they did in 2001, and opt for the safety of the PAP.

On the PAP side, there was the Ivan Lim incident. In this slate of candidates, the PAP chose to highlight some crazy sob sob story of the candidate, in order to impress viewers that they were all Horatio Algers who rose up from a tough background to succeed in life. But it got repeated over and over again to the point of parody.

One case stood out in particular: Ivan Lim. Once his candidature was announced, a few people who knew him from his previous incarnation started speaking out. He was a little nasty as a commanding officer of his NS unit, and he had an elitist mentality. Then as a manager in Keppel corp, he rubbed some of his co-workers the wrong way. Yes, he had come from a humble background, but there were so many accounts of his abrasive manner that he just had to step down.

The last issue that rankled most with the voters was that the elections was held in the middle of a pandemic. I don't think this criticism is fair. I think that the Singapore government deserves some props for handling the pandemic well in the community, and quite unfortunately they've had to sacrifice the health of the foreign workers as a result. There will not be a better or worse time to hold the elections in between now and the due date for the elections.

General Elections in the past

There is a little bit of a symmetry here. I am back where I was just before my trip to Mexico. Then, as now, I was thinking about working in data science. (In between those years, I had mainly earned a degree but worked in software engineering instead.) Then, as now, there was an elections going on.

The only difference, basically, is that I'm older and I have more savings in the bank, although not by that much. I still remember hearing that a girl I dated once or twice got married around that day. It was no big deal, but I remember thinking to myself, one door had been opened, and another had been shut. I was leaving Singapore, Singapore was going to start a new era, and this was a new beginning.

2011 elections was the watershed elections. I think there were only very few watershed elections in the history of Singapore. I think 1968 was a watershed election, because it started the almost total dominance of the PAP in Singapore politics. Then the 1981 Anson elections was another watershed, because they lost a seat to JBJ. That started an era of the PAP using dubious tactics to preserve its stranglehold on power.

There were significant elections in between: the 1988 elections was the one which introduced one of the biggest subterfuges of all time, the Group Representation Constituency. The idea was that the GRC would bundle a few adjacent constituencies together to be voted, in as a bloc, and at least one of them would be reserved for a minority. The running of the town council essentially means that you act as a mayor: the town council would be responsible for all the building management for the HDB flats within that constituency. The 1991 elections was a watershed because the PAP lost a total of 4 seats, and also the first post-LKY elections, which was quite a setback for Goh Chok Tong.

It was during these years that Singapore acquired a reputation for being a flawed democracy. There were plenty of maneuvers, all legal, of course, to make sure that any opposition member who got through the firewalls around the PAP domination of parliament would have a hard time. Countless names, like JBJ, Francis Seow, Tang Liang Hong, Chee Soon Juan and James Gomez all found themselves on the wrong side of what LKY called “the knuckleduster”. The PAP was basically a political machine designed to keep opponents out at almost all costs – the one thing they weren't willing to do was to abolish the practice of popular vote bringing people into parliament. They weren't willing to do the dirty work of stuffing ballot boxes, or selectively disenfranchising people. They weren't willing to bend their own rules, but they were willing to make those rules as unfair to the opposition as they possibly could.

The real watershed elections was 2011. I wasn't even fully aware in advance that this elections was going to be different. The 2001 elections was held in the aftermath of 9/11. It was a masterstroke to be holding the elections right after something that scared the crap out of everybody, and the PAP won very big. But it was also the first elections in the internet era, the first one where they surrendered to the public the monopoly of mass communications.

2011 was probably the only elections in my life that it was worth getting genuinely excited about. Perhaps things had been bubbling under for a while. Low Thia Khiang had been elected in 1991, and it seemed for a while that, together with Chiam See Tong, he would just be a nice and quiet backbencher. He was unassuming enough that nobody expected much of him in the beginning, and I hadn't even noticed him in 1991 until he unexpectedly won a seat. That was quite consequential. Until that point in time, JBJ had been the center focal point of the Worker's Party, but he got sued into bankruptcy in the subsequent years. Low managed to lie low. He didn't even get up the ranks of the party until 10 years later in 2001, but what he managed to accomplish subsequently was quite incredible. He built a whole grassroots operation around the WP, and turned the focus of WP into a party which was geared towards grassroots, campaigning and attempting to dilute the dominance of the PAP.

2011 was the year when that approach started to pay off. It was also the first social media elections, when the internet was more than just a lot of blogs which were bitching about the PAP and supporting the opposition for no other reason than to preserve the principles of democracy. There were several developments which made 2011 a memorable elections.

1. There was a new generation of younger or more capable people who were willing to join the opposition. Sylvia Lim was a smart cookie, and a former lawyer and constable. Chen Show Mao was a lawyer with a high powered CV. Unfortunately LKY was proven right when he sneered at Chen Show Mao for being a lightweight, but at that time his stack of prestigious degrees seemed formidable. There were people like Vincent Wijeysingha, who was the son of my school principal. He fit the mould of your westernised liberal, and he was gay to boot. There was Tan Jee Say, who was a former Principal Private Secretary to Goh Chok Tong. But equally significantly, there was Nicole Seah, a rising political star, not only with good looks and charisma, but also a serious mindedness. Seemingly the most talented adversary since Lim Chin Siong.
2. Peoples' hearts were with the opposition. The opposition had suffered so long under the thumb of the PAP that they readily elicited sympathy. People were astounded that a new generation of people came along who were also of the clean cut goody two shoes image politician that the PAP would have produced, and a few of them were even high achievers. They also acknowledged the sacrifices of the older generation of opposition members, who kept the fire of democracy burning. Chiam See Tong, who has suffered a stroke a few years earlier was probably in no shape or form to run, but still did. He got his wife to take over for him in his iconic Potong Pasir seat, which for whatever reason straddled a small part of Toa Payoh. And he very nearly won the seat. But that means that he got kicked out of his home turf, and thereafter had to ride off into the sunset. Lee Kuan Yew and Goh Chok Tong were to retire from the cabinet.
3. Some of the crowds were the most amazing things that I ever saw. Perhaps people were charged, and fired up. They tended to be more fired up than ever before. There was a truly emotional farewell to Chiam See Tong at one of the Potong Pasir coffee shops in his ward. It was packed with people sending him off. It was one of the most stirring sights I ever saw in Singapore. As were the videos posted of people yelling Worker's Party slogans and marching out of the stadium in the thousands. It was one of the most electrifying atmospheres I had ever seen.
4. Since this was the first social media campaign, it was pretty amazing to see that some of the opposition members had gotten their act together to produce very slick campaign videos. It was very heartening of Singaporeans to know that on top of having one party who knew how to run the country, you had a few more who were perfectly capable of matching the PAP in their campaigning game.
5. It wasn't just the opposition who had changed. The PAP had also changed, and it was barely able to avert what in relative terms would have been an absolute disaster. They ended up apologising for the mistakes they had made. Previously they had run on an impeccable record of never ever getting it wrong, and of silencing doubters as people whose loyalty was suspect. Now, the people had managed to get it to apologise! It's possible that without that apology, the PAP would have lost even more ground, and quite possibly, the supermajority. And what's even more significant, is that the old culture of intimidating your opponents into silence had forever changed. Instead, it had to run on a platform of “we're still the only party who knows how to do this. The opposition has nothing else to offer but nice words,”
6. After the results came out, there were shocks. Chiam's party had narrowly lost Potong Pasir. The Worker's Party had won a GRC in Aljunied. George Yeo was a well respected and liked minister, but his career was over.

People talked about the “new normal”, where people had a little more freedom to do whatever they wanted. The PAP was still obsessed with control, but now they were doing it with a lighter touch. Over the next decade, Singapore had reason to be proud. They could be proud on the 50th Jubilee, and conveniently LKY passed away that year, and gave the PAP a big boost in the elections. Anthony Chen was making a few good films. Sonny Liew was making his comic book masterpiece. Joseph Schooling was preparing for his Olympic medal gold. Those were good years. We thought that this was the new place that Singapore was turning into, some kind of a weird tech marvel. I wasn't here for the 2015 elections, and it did seem to me to be some kind of a rehabilitation for the government. After a near disaster for them, when Tan Cheng Bock came within a narrow margin of winning the presidency, and two by-elections lost to the Worker's Party, the PAP came roaring back.

In the meantime, it seemed as though the government had learnt something about mastering the social media game. It seemed as though a lot of liberalisation resulted in the unleashing of plenty of pent-up creative energy. It seemed, for a few years, Singapore was enjoying some kind of a renaissance.

And then came the shame of the TanChengBlock and the Oxley Road Saga, and the troubles of the Xi Jinping presidency, when China would start to provoke fights with the USA. And finally, the pandemic.

In a way, this elections was not earth shattering. I used to think that it was highly unusual for the PAP to receive a vote share in the low 60s, compared to the early days of independence when they were consistently wiping the floor with the opposition. Actually, I found out that in the elections between 1984 and 1997, their vote share was in the low 60s, and this was the beginning of the PAP trying to fix the opposition. I remember what it was like growing up in the 1980s in Singapore. It wasn't an entirely happy country, because it was a cloistered place and very boring.

In a way, 1984 was another “watershed” election. Seen in this way, the elections from 2001 to 2015 had the PAP polling more than 65%, with one exception, which was 2011. But maybe in another way, these years were the winter years for the opposition. They were lying low and tired of getting “fixed”. Life in Singapore was getting harder and maybe it was better to just go with the flow.

But there's a reason why this post-2011 “new normal” is different from the 1980s. Back then, you didn't have all the seats contested. It is not possible to compare the 61% polled in 1991 to the 61% polled in 2020, because in 1991, that was the by-election effect. They returned the PAP to power on nomination day, and everybody voted, knowing that there would not be a freak result that would have the PAP thrown out of power. The opposition knew to avoid the seats where the PAP was strong. They knew to avoid the GRCs. The 61% polled by the PAP in 2020 is worse because it's the result of all the seats being contested.