Next Prime Minister

LKY is the father of our nation. At least, he is one of the founding fathers, and one is reminded of how Jefferson, Adams, Madison, Washington, Franklin and Hamilton are enshrined in American history.

At the same time, for some reason, Lee Hsien Loong is the guy at the centre of PM transitions. When it was Lee Kuan Yew to Goh Chok Tong, people talked about LHL. Then GCT to LHL, people also talked about LHL. And now LHL is still on the seat that GCT spent 14 years warming for him.  

In the past, successions of the PM have been well arranged, and that's because both of the successions involved the eventual transfer of the premiership to LHL. And some of us didn't really like the idea of there being a Lee dynasty, but we accepted that LHL was a good enough leader for Singapore - and in any case filling in LKY's shoes is always a tall order. And we accepted that when LHL was done, he would be the last of the Lees to occupy that seat, because a third Lee would be kinda weird. 

Well, some kinda weird things have been taking place. Lee Hsien Loong was voted into parliament in an SMC, so clearly he passed the first test. And he took on portfolio after portfolio, and during a time when the premiership was a triumvirate between Goh Chok Tong and the two Lees, he managed things well and acquitted himself favourably. 

LHL became prime minister in 2004, and the generational handover was complete. But now it's time to think about the end of his premiership. And when you look at things in that light, you're starting to wonder about whether he really wants to step down. 

LHL presided over the worst showing in a general elections in Singapore's history, in 2011. In many ways, it was not entirely his fault. But after the elections, LKY and GCT left the cabinet. LKY was given a strange title of "Minister Mentor" and GCT was given the title of Emeritus Senior Minister", and you have to wonder if that was LHL's way of telling them that the jig was up.

Then there was the case of ministerial succession. It probably was the case that some young chap would have been groomed to take over. The deputy prime ministers were Tharman Shanmugaratnam and Teo Chee Hean but in spite of Tharman's popularity, he never took over. There seemed to be 3 things that counted against him - his political views being more liberal than the rest of the cabinet, his being an Indian, and his not being young enough. 

And there weren't that many people who seemed to be able to take over. When you looked at the cabinet during the early years of LHL, most of them were either older than him, and from the second or 3rd generation, or they were already operating at the peak of their powers. There was Lim Swee Say, Raymond Lim, George Yeo and Vivien Balakrishnan. Of the 4, only Vivien is left. 

When the PAP lost Aljunied GRC, they also lost 3 members of the cabinet: George Yeo, Lim Hwee Hwa and Ong Ye Kung (the latter would have been a cabinet minister). They eventually got Ong Ye Kung, but they learnt a painful lesson that for the first time, a general election could disrupt your cabinet staffing plans. 

Eventually, the word was that the next prime minister would be either Ong Ye Kung, Chan Chun Sing or Heng Swee Keat. Rumour had it that Chan Chun Sing was going to be the prime minister, but somehow he was either unpopular with the people or unpopular with the cabinet. So Heng Swee Keat was the prime minister designate instead. 

Then came the Oxley road scandal. It turned out that after the death of LKY, his 3 children disagreed on the fate of the famous Oxley Road house. Lee Hsien Loong wanted the house to be gazetted as a national monument, and the other two siblings wanted the house to be torn down. And even in LKY's last days, there was a lot of editing of his last will and testament to reflect either position. It was rather spooky, because the Singapore establishment had always tried to present a united face to the rest of the world. There were some rumours that the in-laws - Lee Suet Fern and Ho Ching - were not getting along. 

In the heat of this unseemly public debate, another issue got raised, and this time it was raised by one of the grandkids, Li Shengwu, son of Lee Hsien Yang. He accused Li Hongyi of having designs to one day succeed his father as prime minister. And that brought up uncomfortable questions of why LHL wanted Oxley Road to be preserved. Did he want the Lee family to continue having some kind of control over Singapore's government long after he left? What would be the nature of such control?

For Heng Swee Keat to be designated the next prime minister, the narrative was that he was the cabinet's choice, rather than LHL's own choice. But there were all sorts of question marks over him taking over. First, he had only been in the cabinet since 2011 (but that is true for any of the prime minister candidates). Second, he already had health problems, and a stroke. Third, he wasn't that young. Fourth was his performance during the 2020 elections. 

His performance during the 2020 elections was a little wanting: during nomination day, he was surprisingly moved from his old ward in Tampines to stand in East Coast GRC. His speech was met with derision, and he talked about an "East Coast plan", a goodie bag of improvements to the ward. It was mocked mercilessly. He was the bulwark that was intended to hold on to the East Coast GRC from being toppled by the Worker's Party, which was quite surprising. Prime Ministers and Deputy Prime Ministers were usually given safe wards, or at least, the Worker's Party would avoid contesting the wards that had senior ministers in them. I don't really know why Heng Swee Keat was given a dangerous seat, although in the end, he did do right by the PAP by winning that dangerous seat, albeit with a relatively low share of the votes (less than 55% if I remember correctly) Even if Heng Swee Keat did save the PAP from losing East Coast GRC, people could still point to the 55% vote share and start to question his credentials for being PM. 

Later on, there was a parliament session, when he faced off with Sylvia Lim and was found wanting in his responses. LHL did little to hide his displeasure. There were all manner of signals that showed that he was supremely reluctant to let Heng Swee Keat succeed him. 

And then you had the news that we had last week - the shocking but not surprising news that Heng Swee Keat was no longer the prime minister designate. He even claimed that being a cabinet minister was "national service" and that he had no great ambition to be prime minister. How does somebody who has no great ambition to be prime minister temporary derail LHL's plan for succession? 

Does all this tie in with LHL's long term plans for the relationship between the Lee family and the future PAP cabinet? I don't really know, but it's a good question to ask. 

What seems to be clear is that there are various factions with their various agenda. I don't know who they are or what the agenda is, but the PAP is certainly not a monolithic entity now, if it ever was in the past. We don't know if there are any plans for Li Hongyi to take over at some point, but certain events could be interpreted as such. As for now, there is a big push amongst some people in the civil service for us to accept Chan Chun Sing as the prime minister heir apparent, which could be seen as paving the way for a next Lee, and could also be seen as but a natural course of events, since you'd always want people to get behind the guy, no matter what. 

For the first 50 years, once the political turbulence around the time of Singapore's separation died down, once the dust settled down, various things seemed to be true:

1. Singapore has a stable political environment.

2. Singapore was a nation based on economic progress.

3. Singapore was an export-led economy in the middle of a free trade zone which was dominated by a rules based order centered around the West and the USA

One by one, these tenets seem to be questioned.