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With her good looks and celebrity appeal, Nicole Seah
has put politics back into the mainstream for a generation of
disaffected and apathetic youths
By Cheryl Chan
Political Correspondent
When Nicole Seah announced her candidacy for Marine Parade GRC a
couple of weeks ago, there was no way she could have predicted that
she was soon to become Singapore’s second-most popular politician
on Facebook – so popular indeed that watch retailers City Chain
would offer her an
five-figure endorsement
deal.
Though she subsequently turned down the offer – thought to be
the first ever to have been made to a politician in Singapore – the
fact that City Chain wanted her as its poster girl speaks volumes
about how she has managed to capture the attention of a generation
that has been branded apathetic, apolitical and indifferent.
Ms Seah has managed to get young Singaporeans interested in
politics, something that perhaps no politician from either the
ruling or opposition parties has managed to do for the best part of
25 years.
Her good looks and ‘star appeal’, coupled with her aggressive,
direct and passionate rally speeches, have led the country’s
‘Generation Y’ to take an interest in politics for the first time
in their lives, with many on the internet labelling her a ‘hero’,
‘saviour’ and ‘Singapore’s great hope’.
Despite her popularity, Ms Seah will not win her electoral
contest in Marine Parade and will not be returned as a Member of
Parliament, thanks to Singapore’s skewed political landscape and
one-sided electoral rules.
But that isn’t quite the point. She has already won a battle
that many seasoned veterans before her could not have even dreamed
of winning – she has managed to make politics cool, and in so
doing, she has sounded a clarion call to Singapore’s cynical and
materialistic youth to rediscover their idealism. She has given
them the impetus and the inspiration to dream. And most
importantly, she has shattered the old paradigm that politics was
best left to the politicians, being a living example that anyone
and everyone can play a part in shaping the country’s future.
The idealism of youth has always been the catalyst for social
change. Students, in particular, have been at the forefront of just
about every significant political movement in the past century, not
always with good results – as the Tiananmen Square incident in 1989
will attest. Nonetheless, no change can be brought about without
the involvement of raw youthful passion, as evidenced by the fact
that Lee Kuan Yew was in his 30s when he first led Singapore’s
independence movement. Many of his comrades, including Lim Chin
Siong, were in their 20s.
Nicole Seah has become a social media phenomenon, with
more than 46,000 fans on Facebook and a host of fan videos on
YouTube
Since the heady days of Merdeka, however, Lee and his PAP
colleagues have sought to suppress Singapore’s hotbeds of political
activity – subjugating key institutions such as the press, the Law
Society and the NUS Students’ Union, no to mention closing down
Nanyang University altogether.
Knowing full well that a bourgeois society would be more
resistant to change, they set out to ensure that Singapore enjoyed
the highest rates of savings and home ownership in the world,
through social engineering mechanisms such as the Central Provident
Fund (CPF) and Housing Development Board (HDB).
The result? For the past two to three decades, young
Singaporeans have eschewed and even become fearful of political
participation. Instead, they have busied themselves with the
pursuit of wealth and material acquisitions – best encapsulated by
the ‘five Cs’ of cash, car, condominium, credit card and country
club.
The level of apathy and cynicism towards any idealistic cause
has led even the present generation of PAP leaders to worry; Prime
Minister Lee Hsien Loong recently commented that it was
very difficult to get private sector high-flyers
to join the party because they were
afraid of ‘risking failure’ in politics. So much so that the PAP
has had to offer its ministers million-dollar salaries to make up
for the opportunity costs of public service.
Nicole Seah is not going to change all of this overnight.
However, her meteoric rise to stardom has confirmed that there is
hope for Singapore’s youth. By bringing political consciousness
back into the mainstream – where it undoubtedly belongs – she has
reminded young Singaporeans that they have a crucial role to play
in shaping the country’s future.
Now, that’s pretty darn cool.
The author is a political correspondent at The Satay
Club. She works as an analyst in a leading multinational research
firm.
http://satayclub.net/2011/05/nicole-makes-politics-cool-again/