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.