Singapore Gears up for General Election

Gerrymandering and political proficiency likely to keep PAP in power

No no no, I’m not looking over your shoulder

Singapore has redrawn its electoral boundaries, a harbinger that the country’s 14th general election since independence is looming well ahead of its November 23 parliamentary deadline, possibly for May or June, drawing protests of gerrymandering from the fractured opposition.

The government, critics say, is doing its best to create political roadblocks for the opposition at a time when the middle class, despite the storied success of the government technocracy, is increasingly disillusioned and under pressure from high housing prices and other issues. Despite 2024 inflation of just 2.4 percent excluding accommodation and private transport cost, voters say cost of living is the most important issue, followed by pressure on wages and rising immigration of guest workers.

The electoral district changes, announced on March 11, are ostensibly to take into account shifts in the voter population. But as in the past, the Electoral Boundaries Review Committee’s skill at redrawing electoral lines is likely to keep the governing People’s Action Party (PAP) in power for another five years. In 2020 polls amid voter dissatisfaction over the Covid-19 pandemic, the ruling party won only 61 percent of the vote, but still was victorious in 83 of the 93 seats up for grabs, or 89.24 percent of the constituencies.

The 33 electoral divisions comprise 15 Single Member Constituencies and 18 Group Representation Constituencies, an increase of one single constituency and one more GRC over 2020, with some existing wards removed or redrawn.

“The People's Alliance for Reform is outraged at the wanton redrawing of the electoral boundaries with no good reasons given,” said Lim Tean, the secretary-general of the coalition of opposition parties, on Facebook. “In particular, we protest that parts of [two districts], where Peoples Voice has been active for the last four and seven years respectively, have now been absorbed into [a new Group Representation Constituency] without any justification.” Lim, secretary-general of the People’s Voice, a component of the coalition, said the parties would contest the redrawn districts vigorously.

Group Representation Constituencies (GRCs), the brainchild of the late founding Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew in 1988, are groups of wards which require at least one minority candidate. The fractured and mostly tiny parties find it difficult to find enough candidates with the political capability to contest GRCs, which require anywhere from three to six candidates to run together. At least one member must be a member of a minority. In 2011, however, an opposition Workers Party team shocked the government by winning the Aljunied GRC, and has continued to retain it.

What is most significant, said another opposition voice, is the dismemberment of two GRCs to forestall either of them falling into the hands of the political opposition. More critically, he said, the Bukit Batok single member constituency, formerly a head-to-head contest between prominent long-time opposition figure Chee Soon Juan of the Social Democrats Party versus Murali Pillai, a long-time PAP member, is now absorbed into a newly created GRC, hence denying Chee potentially his final shot at getting into Parliament elected on his own standing for the SDP.

The total number of constituencies will increase from 93 to 97 to cover a citizen population increase – most of it from in-migration – from 3.52 million to 3.64 million in June 2025. The total population is 6.09 million, with the difference made up by guest workers.

Wong to fight the polls

It will be the first election led by Lawrence Wong, who took over last May 15 after winning his governing spurs as co-chairman of a cross-ministerial committee formed to manage the Covid situation, which would be held to 2,024 deaths despite 3.006 million infections. His performance will be closely watched because it is the first election since independence that a member of the Lee family is not either running it or waiting in the wings, although former Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong will be looking over Wong’s shoulder as senior minister, a position occupied by his late father Lee Kuan Yew of his retirement from the premiership.

Wong has close ties with Hsien Loong but must prove he is more than just a place-holder while conspiracy theorists believe the former premier is jockeying with his powerful wife Ho Ching to engineer their son, Li Hongyi, director of the Open Government Products (OGP) division of the Government Technology Agency, into position to continue the Lee dynasty.

Despite voter malaise, Wong has inherited a high-income economy that is the envy of Asia, built on a business-friendly regulatory environment and strong investments in infrastructure, education, healthcare, and public services and rated among the world’s most competitive, among the highest in the World Bank’s Human Capital Index. It has benefited considerably from increasing political repression in Hong Kong as well as Hong Kong’s mishandling of the Covid-19 pandemic, which has driven many multinationals to relocate. Unemployment is enviably low at 1.9 percent, remaining at its lowest level since the second quarter of 2023.

But seemingly the government can’t resist tightening the screws on both the opposition and the press, running opposition leader Pritam Singh over the coals and fining him a maximum S$7,000 (US$5,223) in February for each of two charges relating to Singh's handling of a former lawmaker from his party who lied to parliament last year in a separate case.

The government, Human Rights Watch (HRW) said in a February release, continues to use its fake news law “to silence and intimidate independent media, opposition politicians, and civil society actors by forcing them to post subjective, government-determined “corrections” and intimidating others to self-censor.”

On February 26, as HRW noted, authorities invoked the Foreign Interference (Countermeasures) Act against two civil society groups as “politically significant persons.” Rights groups are concerned the government may be using the law’s broad provisions to curtail freedoms.

There are international challenges faced by everybody in Asia with the return of Donald Trump to the US presidency and with Singapore one of the US’s strongest partners in Southeast Asia, cooperating on a range of security issues, to include border security, maritime security, military preparedness, counter proliferation, cybersecurity, and counterterrorism, at a time when China is exerting ever more pressure over the South China Sea. Trump is unpredictable, as the situation in Ukraine shows, and not above abandoning treaty partners and allies without warning.

“A common theme throughout is the difficulty of the task that confronts Wong,” according to a 2024 analysis by Kai Ostwald, the HSBC Chair in Asian Research for the Australia-based East Asia Forum. “That begins with evolving geopolitical challenges, particularly the uncomfortable squeeze that the emerging great power rivalry places on smaller states like Singapore. It also includes myriad domestic issues, including discontent with a rising cost of living, anxieties over immigration and political difficulties within the PAP, which some see as creating ‘cracks’ in Singapore’s ‘heavily state-directed society.’”

But as Ostwald notes, “On the domestic front, bread-and-butter themes, immigration and even rising demands for greater political space have been part of the political discourse for at least the past decade. These challenges have not turned Singaporean politics on its head.”