Singapore's Levers of Power

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WSJ
Singapore's Levers of Power
By GARRY RODAN
February 10, 2006

Elections in Singapore never pose any threat to the ruling People's Action Party (PAP), which currently holds 82 of the 84 elected seats in the city state's parliament. With a wide array of institutional mechanisms at its disposal to see off any prospect of real political competition, the results are clear long before voters go to the polls.

But that doesn't mean there aren't issues which can be expected to come to the fore as Lee Hsien Loong leads his first election campaign since becoming premier in 2004, with polls possibly due as early as March. Or that the PAP isn't feeling a little more nervous than Singapore's recent strong economic performance might suggest.

Take, in particular, the Jan. 12 announcement of a S$1 billion (US$613 million) plan to assist Singapore's lowest-paid workers. This suggests that, in contrast to previous elections, the coming campaign is likely to see the PAP focus less on its economic credentials and more on the social issues that it expects to resonate with Singapore's working class, who are often called the "HDB heartlanders." This is a reference to the government-subsidized apartments, built by the Housing Development Board, which provides homes for 84% of the population.

Despite a booming economy, which saw 108,000 jobs created in 2005, competition from China, India and Vietnam has hit Singapore's older unskilled workers hard. For instance, only 30,000 of those new jobs went to locals. And the 500,000 Singaporean workers with educational qualifications below secondary school level are having particular difficulty finding new employment as the economy restructures toward more skilled jobs.

Hence, the PAP's championing of welfarism, albeit under a different name. Its proposed Workfare scheme would provide one-off wage bonuses to workers aged 40 years or older on monthly incomes of S$1,200 or less. They can also apply for further assistance to cover housing, skills training and childcare services.

Announcing the scheme, Manpower Minister Ng Eng Hen insisted it wasn't a form of welfarism, since the aim is to reward participation in the workforce and shore up the work ethic. In truth, the PAP's only objection to welfarism is its ideological connotations. It wants to preserve a paternalistic political relationship in which Singaporeans are rewarded by a benevolent government.

Increasingly, the PAP is drawing on the country's healthy fiscal surpluses to roll out welfare initiatives in the run up to elections. Three months before the 2001 polls it announced the New Singapore Shares scheme. Under this, Singaporeans were given between S$200 and S$1,700 worth of shares linked to accumulated government surpluses, with the option of exchanging some of these benefits for cash.

That the plight of low-paid workers will feature in the election campaigns is assured. On Jan. 14, the Workers' Party, which currently holds one of the two opposition seats, unveiled a manifesto proposing a minimum wage -- a clear policy alternative to the PAP's Workfare initiative.

Nor are those at the bottom of the wages rung the only employees feeling the winds of change in recent years. Government moves to link wages and salaries more directly to market forces and productivity have proved contentious. For example, in 2003, members of the Airline Pilots' Association of Singapore voted out of office the entire 20-person union executive after dissatisfaction with new conditions agreed with management. The government promptly amended the Trades Unions Act to remove the right of union members to ratify any collective agreement signed by their elected representatives.

Acknowledging the political challenge posed by economic restructuring, Lim Boon Heng, the secretary general of the PAP-affiliated National Trades Union Congress, called in recent years for a new "social compact" to smooth the process. Under this, employers should raise skills in return for employee cooperation on wage flexibility and productivity measures.

Not coincidentally, the Workers' Party manifesto also calls for barring government ministers from holding office in trade unions. For instance, Mr. Lim is also a PAP member of parliament, while all but five of the 68 registered unions in Singapore are affiliates of the NTUC that he heads. But state labor cooptation is central to the PAP strategy of industrial and political control. Reforms towards its dilution will not be countenanced.

Another issue that may provide ground for the opposition to exploit is the PAP's 2005 policy about face in introducing casinos to Singapore. This has generated a lot of debate, with the government permitting uncharacteristic political space for critical comment through the local media and the activities of non-governmental organizations. Although not a cause celebre of the PAP's liberal critics, casinos are a sensitive issue among traditional, socially conservative supporters of the PAP -- the HDB heartlanders also feeling the pinch of economic restructuring. The government has been especially keen to avoid alienating Singapore's ethnic Malays, who make up 14% of the population, many of whom oppose the casinos on Islamic religious grounds. However, whether the consultative process adopted has substantially appeased dissenting views remains to be seen.

Ultimately, though, the capacity of the political opposition to capitalize on any of these issues is constrained. Despite charges of gerrymandering from critics, the government continues to resist calls for an independent electoral commission. New boundaries are also usually announced just weeks before elections. In 2001, for example, voters went to the elections just 17 days after new electoral boundaries were released. This makes it more difficult for the opposition to plan and conduct grassroots campaigns. Candidate deposits of S$13,000 also stretch opposition parties' resources -- especially in the multi-member constituencies that are progressively replacing Singapore's single member constituencies. In the current parliament, there are now only nine elected MPs representing single-member seats. The rest belong to group representation constituencies comprising between four and six members.

Controls on the use of the Internet for electioneering purposes, including bans on campaigning from non-party political Web sites, combine with the monopoly of government-controlled domestic media to limit the opposition's ability to project its policies to the electorate and to hold debates with the PAP. Crippling defamation laws have been directed at some of the opposition's most effective communicators and act as a threat against other would-be adversaries. Furthermore, the Societies Act bars political engagement by any groups not registered for such purposes, so undermining civil society and opposition parties' links to it, a problem that erodes the political process long before elections.

Finally, there is a political economy dimension to electoral intimidation. In the last two elections, for example, Singaporeans have been warned that electorates returning opposition candidates face discrimination in the upgrading of Housing Development Board flats. This dependence on the state renders Singaporeans vulnerable to political threats. Then Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong warned before the 1997 poll that constituencies electing opposition candidates would be the last in line for such upgrading. "Then in 20, 30 years' time, the whole of Singapore will be bustling away and your estate, through your own choice, will be left behind. They become slums. That's my message," Mr. Goh was quoted as saying during the campaign. In 2001, Mr. Goh supplemented this by promising the upgrading of flats in those individual precincts within the opposition constituency of Potong Pasir where more than half of the voters supported the PAP.

All of this means that, while there are many issues on which the PAP may be vulnerable to criticism in the upcoming polls, no one should expect the new parliament to look very different from the last.