Triumph of Singaporean values

By Harvey Stockwin

HONG KONG (JP): Though Friday's "general election" has been widely hailed as a triumph for the ruling People's Action Party (PAP), for Singapore's paramount leader, Senior Minister and former prime minister Lee Kuan Yew, and for current Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong, it is important to recognize what kind of triumph it really was.

First and last, it was a triumph for Singapore's well developed, but unique, political system.

Only in Singapore does the ruling party regularly win general elections on nomination day. On this occasion it had secured 47 out of 83 seats when nominations closed.

But this is no new development. Way back in 1968 -- one of the last occasions this correspondent felt a pressing need to witness a Singaporean election firsthand -- no less than 51 seats went uncontested. "The PAP Seven Sweep To Victory" was the headline the next day, as the PAP won all the then 58 seats in Parliament.

As a result of this historical background of near or complete electoral unanimity (well communicated in the Straits Times InterNet web site; its election GE Watch can be found at: http://www.asia1.com.sg/straitstimes/), only in Singapore does the opposition pursue the "strategy" of giving the PAP a majority on nomination day. The opposition reasoning is that voters will be more likely to vote for the opposition parties if they can be assured in advance the PAP will not be defeated.

The reasoning is not entirely bizarre. For nearly three decades, ever since former PAP rivals, the Barisan Socialists, faded from the scene there was only one way the PAP could think of being defeated: if the electorate voted for change just for change's sake. So successful has the PAP been in conveying this anxiety to voters that the opposition now seeks to allay it.

The opposition "strategy" of preemptive defeat has so far been barren of real results. In the last election in 1991 the weak and ineffective opposition parties won a miserable four seats. In the election just completed that total sank to two.

Only in Singapore is the wholly predictable massacre of an unworthy "opposition" immediately seen, by the prime minister, to constitute a "watershed election".

Only in Singapore, too, is the number of voters casting ballots in a minority of seats seen as a reliable index of the preferences of a whole nation.

Singapore authoritarianism has not yet found a way of getting voters to nonetheless cast their ballots, even when there is only one (PAP) candidate in their constituency. So Singaporean electoral statistics are, at the very least, incomplete, given the large number of uncontested seats.

Still, this election is hailed as a watershed in Singapore because the PAP appears to have arrested the long-term decline of its share of the vote. In the 1991 election Goh Chok Tong's future as prime minister appeared in doubt after the PAP share sank to around 61 percent. Now their share of the minority vote is back up to 65 percent, slightly better than the 64.8 percent it won in the 1984 election.

The Straits Times post-election headline read Big Swing to PAP. The fact that, by the same reckoning, there are two opposition members of the new parliament on the basis of 35 percent of the vote has not been stressed in the Singapore media. Reformists in Thailand and Taiwan currently view proportional representation as a possible electoral improvement; this is not the case in Singapore.

The opposition is weak and getting weaker. Yet only in Singapore does a ruling party feel obliged to threaten the loss of government services and development funds in those constituencies with the impudence to vote for the opposition. Several of Singapore's rightly famed but now aging public housing estates are currently being upgraded and refurbished. During the "campaign" Prime Minister Goh bluntly sought to strong-arm such areas with the threat that they might become slums with opposition MPs.

Only in Singapore is such ostensibly "democratic" intimidation seen as a sign of a leader's toughness and fitness to the position of prime minister. Singaporean toughness at home, plus promotion of Singapore as a well armed "poisonous shrimp" abroad, has long been the ethos of Lee Kuan Yew.

Having been tough with the electorate, Goh Chok Tong's tenure on the leadership seems more assured. So much for his promise, on taking over from Lee in 1990, of a "kinder, gentler Singapore".

Singapore's unique situation does not end here. Only in Singapore does an ostensibly democratic incumbent prime minister appoint his opposition -- a power now available to Goh since three or less member of the opposition have been elected.

Only in Singapore does a government reelected in this way still think of taking a demolished opposition to court for alleged electoral infringements.

Only in Singapore would a prime minister, victorious in questionable circumstances, still assert, as Goh did, that the voters "have rejected Western-style liberal democracy and freedoms (which) put individual rights over that of society."

Lee Kuan Yew, Goh, and the PAP leaders have long since rejected the political values that Japanese, Indian, Thai, Taiwanese, and Filipino voters naturally recognize as being not necessarily Western.

In so doing, they enjoy triumph today and probably tomorrow -- but Singapore may one day experience tragedy as a consequence of ultimately barren politics of the bludgeon.