Paul G. Buchanan: A Door Cracks Open in the Little Red
Dot
On May 7 2011, 2.5 million Singaporeans (out of a total
population of 5 million) go to the polls.
As a one party-dominant authoritarian state, the
outcome is already assured--the People's Action Party that has held
power since 1959 will win.
By gerrymandering electoral districts (which has led to
uncontested walkover rates of 50 percent) and placing limits on
opposition party rights to public expression and assembly outside
of the two week campaign season (to include prohibitions on holding
rallies and distributing flyers, posters or pamphlets, which has
resulted in numerous defamation suits against and arrests of
opposition figures over the years--the last in 2010 for a violation
of the "no public assembly of more than 5 people without a Police
permit" law), the PAP might match the 66 percent of the vote
garnered in 2006 (a drop from the 73 percent received in
2001).
It will retain its majority hold of the (recently expanded)
87-member parliament. But there is political change blowing in the
hot and humid Singaporean breeze, which is as much the result of
generational and social change as it is of opposition renewal and
PAP sclerosis. Although it will retain power this time, none of
the trends auger well for the PAP.
Taking 25 years as the generational baseline, Singapore is in
its third generation since gaining political autonomy from the
Malay Federation in 1959 (independence came with its expulsion from
the Federation in 1965). Led by
87-year old Lee Kwan Yew, the first generation of PAP leaders ruled
with tight control until 1990, in an era when Singapore's image as
an austere and puritanical authoritarian state was
forged.
The second generation of hand-picked successors, who began the
slow process of political and social liberalization and
orchestrated the emergence of the country as a major
transportation, logistics and financial hub, is singing its
political swan song today. This
year's election marks the transition to the third generation of
political leadership and not all has gone as planned for the
PAP.
Voting is mandatory in Singapore. Yet spoiled ballots and non-voters amounted to
nearly 10 percent of the 2006 electorate. In other words, the signs
of discontent were already present five years ago.
This year there has been a resurgence of political opposition
led by the Workers Party, the Reform Party and the Singapore
Democratic Party. In marked contrast to previous elections, 82 of
the 87 parliamentary seats will be contested. Among the ranks of
the opposition are defectors from the PAP, former
government-sponsored overseas scholars (who usually pay their
scholarship debt by returning to assume bureaucratic positions and
joining the PAP), former Internal Security Act detainees (the ISA
allows for the indefinite detention of suspects without charge and
some of the current opposition candidates have spent long periods
in confinement) and political exiles.
Most of the new candidates are in their mid 20s to mid 40s,
thereby representing a coming of age for their generation of free
thinkers.
In response, the PAP
has trotted out the usually ensemble of former bureaucrats and
politicized retired military officers, interspersed with a handful
of younger neophytes (including one whose qualifications for office
apparently are that she is the wife of the Prime Minister's
executive assistant and has a penchant for
shopping--the latter being Singapore's national
pastime).
What is most revealing is that the PAP is no
longer able to hide its internal divisions, with leading officials,
Ministers and even the Minister Mentor (how's that for a title?)
Lee Kwan Yew himself openly disagreeing about issues of politics,
policy and social construction.
Sensing a shift in the public mood, some PAP candidates
have withdrawn from the election.
All of this underscores something that the Minister Mentor said
last year: that the PAP must rejuvenate or stagnate, and that
democracy would only come when the PAP proved incapable of
responding to public expectations as a result of its
stagnation.
The trouble for the PAP is that the elections have come too
quickly for a major re-generation of its cadres, which in a
talent-thin environment such as Singapore (owing to its population
size, as anyone who looks beyond the front benches of the New
Zealand parliament will understand), means that the moment of
political reckoning has come much sooner than the 25 years Lee Kwan
Yew envisioned.
Even worse for the PAP, although the government
controls all of the mainstream media in Singapore, including the
Straits Times and the telecommunications giant MediaCorp, it has
been unable to staunch the flow of internet criticism of its
personnel and policies, or the grassroots mobilization of support
for the opposition.
Much concern has been voiced about increasing inefficiencies in
public services, the high cost of living, the loss of white collar
jobs to foreigners, and the government's astronomical pay scales
(the Prime Minister--Lee Kwan Yew's
son--is paid S$4.5 million per/year, senior ministers make S$3
million and parliamentary backbenchers start at
S$150,000.
In fact according to the Economist, Singapore has the second highest ratio of
political leader's pay to the country's GDP per person, with the
average salary of US$2,183,516).
In the face of what looks to be the possibility of losing
previously safe seats amid an unprecedented wave of electoral
contestation, the PAP has
resorted to fear-mongering, focusing on the tired old canards of
economic insecurity, Malay sedition, jihadist
terrorism, unskilled foreign workers from the
sub-continent and mainland China bringing crime and stealing local
jobs, and gay rights (homosexuality is illegal in Singapore but as
part of the social liberalization process enforcement of sodomy
laws has been weak and episodic over the last decade.
This has been a major concern of social conservatives, including
the very large number of ethnic Chinese Christians found on the
island who are a core PAP constituency). Is speaks ominously of
hidden agendas and questions why the opposition would seek to take
control of government (apparently failing to recognize that the
purpose of political parties include competing for the authority to
govern or at least influence government policy). Yet the more it
raises the specter of Singapore returning to its polyglot swampland
brothel and opium den past, the more the PAP is ridiculed for being
out of touch with the wants and needs of contemporary
Singaporeans.
This means that this election and
its aftermath will constitute a critical juncture in Singaporean
history. It will set the stage for the next critical juncture,
which will be the occasion and aftermath of Lee Kwan Yew's
death.
The notion of critical juncture is important and needs
explaining. Using economics-derived path dependency analysis (in
which human behavior is "locked in" by past institutional practice
the more that practice is routinised over time), critical junctures
are historical moments when decisive choices are made within given
institutional parameters that set the future course of events (the
most common used analogies are the "fork in the road" and “tree
branch” motifs).
Because of its internal divisions, Lee
Kwan Yew's death will be the moment when the knives come out within
the PAP, with moderate reformists and liberalizers pitted against
hard-line status quo defenders in what could wind up as a splitting
of the party.
Since the hard-line elements
constitute the bulk of the deadwood and sclerotic elements within
the PAP, it is quite possible, given the outcome of this election,
that reformists will gain control of the party and move to
accommodate moderate opposition views in a grand coalition strategy
designed to help preserve their hold on power after
2016.
But that is precisely why this election constitutes a
pre-conditioning critical juncture that will set the stage for the
next one. Processes of authoritarian regime liberalization tend to
be "two-steps forward, one step backwards" affairs.
The regime opens a little, the opposition pushes further than
what is acceptable to the regime, and the regime pushes back.
Confronted with a rising tide of opposition success and grassroots
mobilizations against one-party rule that cannot be contained with
selective application of the ISA and the usual use of defamation
and non-assembly laws, the PAP regime
will therefore be forced to opt for one of two paths: repress or
reform. Its previous preferred strategy of cooptation will no
longer work.
This is important to consider because the reformists constitute
a minority of the current PAP leadership. The PAP status quo--many of who have held their
sinecures for more than a decade--control the levers of government
and retain the loyalty of the armed forces (which have internal
security and regime protection as well as external defense
roles).
Thus, even if there are internal tensions within the armed
forces between "professional" and "political" officers (the former
focused on the technical merits of soldiering and the latter
concerned with career advancement via political linkages), and its
leadership sclerosis is profound, the PAP can, if it wants to, halt
the process of social and political opening any time it wishes.
Because it still has a reservoir of support in the so-called
(ethnic Chinese) "heartland," the regime can push back without
incurring major backlash.
This is not to say that there will not be any. Singaporeans are
largely a passive and conformist society, so a move to repress or
politically back-peddle will not be met with mass demonstrations
akin to those of the Middle East today or Latin America in
the
in the past.
But even if they acquiesce to the retrogression, the third
generation of Singaporean voters will not consent to a return to
the days of canings for jaywalking and imprisonment or bankruptcy
for reasonable (unarmed) dissent. Instead, they will engage in
passive resistance and low-level protests with increased grassroots
mobilization over the internet, including social media and other
hard-to-filter communications vehicles.
Since Singapore is an extremely "wired" society that depends on
its telecommunications capabilities for much of its daily business,
Chinese-style censorship will be very hard to maintain even though
the government controls the telecommunications duopoly through
which all internet access is filtered (I will not digress into the
reaction of foreign actors to any such retrogression but suffice it
to say that it will not be entirely supportive).
This means that the PAP is staring at the beginning of the end
in this election. The opposition has organized, mobilized and taken
advantage of the limited political space afforded to it by the
manipulated electoral system. The PAP
has reacted slowly and awkwardly to the opposition's energetic
display. It therefore sits on the horns of a dilemma: accept
that power sharing is inevitable over the short term and rotation
in government office is quite possible within a few years (or at
least much sooner than expected), or use its election victory to
reassert its political supremacy, by force if necessary, over
pretenders to its throne.
That will influence the context in which the
power struggles following Lew Kuan Yew's death will occur, which in
turn will determine whether or not the slow process of
authoritarian liberalization will continue or be
halted. At that point the moment of truth will have
arrived for a country struggling with its identity as a modern
bridge between East and West.
Paul G. Buchanan is the founder of Buchanan Strategic
Advisors, Ltd., a New Zealand based political risk and market
intelligence consultancy. From 2008 to 2011 he was a Visiting
Associate Professor of Political Science at the National University
of Singapore. An earlier version of this essay was published at
Kiwipolitico
http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL1104/S00158/paul-g-buchanan-a-door-cracks-open-in-the-little-red-dot.htm
