Will the Trump tariffs slow Singapore's political evolution?

Singaporean Prime Minister Lawrence Wong speaks next to Senior Minister Lee Hsien Loong at a People's Action Party rally ahead of Saturday's general election. Reuters

Singapore goes to the polls this Saturday, and while the result is unlikely to be an upset, the vote could still prove consequential for Prime Minister Lawrence Wong and his People’s Action Party, which has won every election since the city-state became a fully independent country in 1965.

Mr Wong and his colleagues will be judged not just by the majority they secure – they won 89 per cent of seats in Parliament in 2020 – but by the percentage of the vote they garner. In that last election, the PAP was rewarded with 61.2 per cent of all votes, which in most democracies would be considered an overwhelming mandate. In Singapore, however, that was a cause for soul-searching among the victors. The context is this: between 1965 and 1981, the PAP won every single seat in Parliament, and it received 84 per cent of the vote in the 1968 election.

The long-term trend for the PAP, then, is incremental decline. If it dips below 60 per cent on Saturday, there will be serious questions asked. PAP rule has been seen as key to Singapore’s stability. What if it looks as though it could, one day, lose power? The experience of neighbouring Malaysia, which went through four years of extreme political instability after the Barisan Nasional coalition lost power in 2018 for the first time since independence in 1957, is a cautionary tale.

As one of the city-state’s leading public intellectuals Kishore Mahbubani put it in his 2015 book, Can Singapore Survive?, “Any political scientist will tell you that it is ‘normal’ for most states in the world to have a political crisis every few decades. By not having a political crisis for several decades, Singapore has demonstrated that it is not keeping within statistical norms. If over time we conform to statistical norms, the laws of statistical probability will kick in and we will inevitably have a political crisis.”

Pedestrians walk past a tribute corner for Singapore's late former prime minister Lee Kuan Yew in March 2015. Roslan Rahman/AFP

And that, in the eyes of Mr Mahbubani and others, could lead to irresponsible governance and the loss of all that this little island has so far achieved over the past 60 years. So if the PAP wins bigger than in 2020, which was a near-historic low, there will be great relief in the corridors of power.

The result will also be considered a verdict on Mr Wong, who has only been Prime Minister for just under a year, and has some pretty big boots to fill. There is not just the ineluctable shadow cast by Singapore’s founding father, Lee Kuan Yew, a giant of 20th-century Asia. Mr Lee’s son, Lee Hsien Loong, also a long-time former prime minister, sits in Mr Wong’s cabinet as Senior Minister. A resounding victory would allow Mr Wong to claim the personal authority to take whatever steps he deems necessary to deal with an increasingly unsettled economic and geopolitical landscape in the Asia-Pacific.

And warning of the dangers of instability has been one of the notes Mr Wong has sounded in the election campaign. “A vote for the opposition is not a free vote for more alternative voices in Parliament. It’s a vote to weaken the PAP team, and it will do so at a time when I have just taken over,” the Prime Minister told a crowd on Monday. “It will weaken us at a time when our country is facing real and serious challenges.”

Given the uncertainty caused by US President Donald Trump’s startling announcements – especially on tariffs – Mr Wong’s argument may cut through. But although by any measure Singapore is still a huge success, the PAP cannot rely indefinitely on its record of having moved the city “From Third World to First”, as the elder Mr Lee titled the second volume of his memoirs. Consumer prices are up by 17 per cent since 2020, with public housing costs also rising fast. Does the PAP contain the only members of Singapore’s highly educated population who can deal with the challenges of today?

The debate, however, is not really about who is going to win – almost no one doubts that will be the PAP – but about the merits of having a “more balanced Parliament”, as Pritam Singh, the official Leader of the Opposition and Secretary General of the Workers’ Party, puts it. “You can have us on committees. We can make our contribution,” he said of his MPs. “I believe, when you have a diversity of views in Parliament, as long as we are rowing in the same direction, this red dot will continue to be a bright, shining red dot.”

Workers' Party Secretary General and Leader of the Opposition Pritam Singh looks on during a press conference ahead of Saturday's general elections in Singapore. Reuters

Critics of Singapore often claim that it isn’t a real democracy: that the PAP has effective control of all the supposed checks and balances, and that the electoral maps are drawn to make it hard for the opposition parties to break through. This time around, PAP leaders have warned that if key figures were to lose their seats it would weaken the government.

Mr Singh addressed both points in mentioning the most famous instance of a PAP leader being ejected by the voters, when the then foreign minister George Yeo and his colleagues failed to win the Aljunied multi-member constituency in 2011. Yes, the opposition did win the seat. But “Mr Yeo – I have full respect for him – has continued to serve Singapore in so many different ways,” said Mr Singh, presumably in reference to the numerous roles in the public and private sectors Mr Yeo has undertaken since.

It’s hard to disagree with Mr Singh that, after all this time, a little more diversity in Singapore’s Parliament might not be a bad thing. With all parties committed to maintaining harmony in the multiracial, multifaith country, would it really be a disaster if the PAP didn’t win the two thirds majority in Parliament necessary to pass constitutional amendments? I, for one, don’t think it would. For Mr Wong and his colleagues, however, it would be hard not to consider it exactly that.

And that’s the Singapore dilemma in a nutshell. Can the country exhale, loosen up, and still maintain its success? Or is it vital that the PAP remain firmly in charge, because, as Senior Minister Lee Hsien Loong likes to say, “Only the paranoid survive”? We’ll find out what Singaporeans think this weekend.