TR EMERITUS

From The Asian Sentinel

The island republic sends forth yet another electoral Trojan Horse

Given the Singapore government’s oft-repeated mantra that multi-party politics is not appropriate for a small city-state, it might have surprised outside observers when Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong recently unveiled plan to boost the number of opposition MPs in parliament.

Only last November at the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) annual conference, Lee insisted that a “two-party model cannot work in Singapore” and that “the country is much better off with one dominant party”.

Just seven months later, Lee seems to have changed his tune somewhat. Now, he acknowledges that “Singaporeans want national issues to be fully debated” and that the government should “improve our political system to encourage a wider range of views in Parliament, including opposition and non-government views”.

The government thus plans to change the constitution to ensure that there are at least nine opposition MPs in Singapore’s supine Parliament (currently just three of the 85 voting MPs are not PAP apparatchiks) by expanding the existing system whereby the best-performing electoral losers are awarded parliamentary seats with watered-down powers.

Coming after recent decisions to permit public protests (albeit only in one specified location) and allow the release of some political films (subject to government vetting), it almost appears as if the prime minister and his PAP allies have undergone some sort of damascene conversion to liberal democratic principles.

But, in reality, the latest reforms are nothing more than Trojan horse politics, designed to head off the growing clamor for more alternative voices and to sow discord between Singapore’s spattering of brave but fractious opposition politicians. The PAP has maintained an iron grip on power since Singapore won independence from Britain in 1959 not by locking up its opponents, although it does occasionally resort to such tactics, but by dominating public discourse, castrating opposition politicians through libel proceedings and manipulating the electoral system to its advantage.

Lee junior’s proposed parliamentary reforms are just the latest example of this approach.

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