Singapore in 2021: Confronting Internal and External Challenges
July 9, 2022
The 2020 General Elections were held in Singapore on 10 July, in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic. Though the ruling party retained its supermajority in Parliament, the 2020 general election saw the strongest-ever performance by the opposition since 1965. The general election also brought challenges for political succession as the designated successor to the prime minister, Heng Swee Keat, barely secured his electoral seat.
In ‘Singapore in 2021: Confronting Internal and External Challenges’ (Asian Survey, 2022) Associate Professor Bilveer Singh (NUS Department of Political Science) writes about the impact of COVID-19 and the political succession crisis on the staying power of government in Singapore, a one-dominant-party state.
Since July 2020, parliamentary debates have become robust, to the credit of the opposition Workers’ Party for bringing constructive arguments and leading to greater public awareness of national issues. However, in November 2021, the Workers’ Party entered a crisis when one of its Members of Parliament (MPs), Raeesah Khan, admitted she had lied to Parliament.
On April 8 2021, Deputy Prime Minister Heng announced his decision to step down as leader of the fourth-generation (4G) People’s Action Party (PAP) team. Since then, there was a focus on which minister could lead Singapore in the future, with Lawrence Wong, the current finance minister, being announced to be the next leader a year after Heng’s step down. This succession crisis is an unfamiliar political experience, with the previous two prime ministers settling the issue of their successors ten years before they relinquished power.
Singapore faced a slew of international challenges in 2021, with the key goal of Singapore’s foreign policy to make itself relevant to the international community without succumbing to pressures being increasingly difficult to manoeuvre. In February 2021, a military coup in Myanmar ousted Aung San Suu Kyi, the country’s civilian leader. As Singapore is Myanmar’s largest investor and is close to the military junta, protestors in Myanmar called for a boycott of Singaporean products and financial institutions.
Additionally, Singapore was visited by US Defence Secretary Lloyd Austin, US Vice President Kamala Harris, and China’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, Wang Yi. With tensions between the US and China heightening, a journalist questioned Singapore’s minister of foreign affairs Vivian Balakrishnan on whether Singapore was caught in a “diplomatic competition” between the US and China.
Other international developments include the fall of Afghanistan to the Taliban, then prime minister of Malaysia Muhyiddin Yassin resigning, and the India-Singapore Comprehensive Economic Cooperation Agreement (CECA) troubling both bilateral relations and resurfacing inter-racial and inter-religious conflicts locally.
For the PAP, neither a pandemic nor an economic crisis is a new problem – severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) was easily managed in 2003, and the various economic challenges since the 1980s were triumphantly overcome. Yet Singapore remains in uncharted waters with COVID-19, its longest-running health crisis. The PAP’s management of COVID-19 is linked to the economic well-being of Singapore and the public perception of the 4G leaders who have been tasked with leading the country and overcoming the pandemic, which affects the government’s political legitimacy.
Read the article here.