GE2025: That familiar dilemma again

Since I already went to the SDP's rally on Thursday night, I decided to stay home to watch the party political broadcasts last night. Back to the rallies tonight! The Straits Times has a calendar here for you to check out what's on.

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Highlights

“I want to send the PAP a message but the opposition in my constituency is 💩”
I got this question over Instagram Stories yesterday. It’s something that’s consistently come up in the past few elections, which means I’ve thought about it every election. Here’s my answer (slightly edited from the version on Stories):

If we lived in a functioning competitive democracy, voters can judge each political party for what they are rather than what they’re not. But the reality in Singapore right now is that we don’t live in a functioning competitive democracy with, as Pritam Singh of the Workers’ Party calls it, a “balanced political system”.

We live under a system where the playing field is so skewed it’s essentially a one-party state. The People’s Action Party dominates everything from Parliament to media coverage to the “unions” and the “grassroots”. They can pass any law they like—even amend the supreme law of the land—because there aren’t enough opposition candidates in Parliament to stop them.

Elections offer Singaporeans the opportunity to correct this imbalance, even though it’s really difficult given the way the electoral system (GRC, First-Past-The-Post, redrawn electoral boundaries, etc.) works. But as Ariffin Sha of the Singapore Democratic Party has pointed out, we’ve seen that the vote-share matters too. Although the the vote-seat disproportionality in Singapore is stunningly high—in 2020, the PAP got about 90% of the parliamentary seats with only around 60% of the popular vote—a slim margin of victory gives the party a kick up the backside and reminds them they can’t take Singaporeans for granted.

It really sucks to live in a constituency where the competition is, to put it mildly, cursed. But shitty though we might find them, the presence of some of these opposition parties means fewer walkovers, because the more credible opposition parties don’t seem ready to contest the entire island. With all this as background, this is how I think about it:

• A spoilt vote ultimately helps the PAP
• A vote for the PAP just bolsters their vote-share in a context where they’re going to win anyway (remember this special issue on the myth of the “strong mandate”!)
• Voting for the opposition doesn't mean you love them, but it's a protest vote against the PAP. The opposition isn’t going to win anyway; voting for them instead of the PAP is one way voters can send a message.

This doesn’t mean it feels good to vote for an opposition party that doesn’t align with our true beliefs. It shouldn’t feel good; if you’re agonising over this, it shows how much you care about your vote and how troubled you are about the party that pretty much already holds the power (otherwise you’d just vote for them without hesitation, no?)

One day, when the playing field is more level, we can judge each party for what they are and not who they’re fighting. At that time, those of us who’ve held our noses to vote for unserious parties will finally have the opportunity to tell the homophobes, xenophobes, racists and grifters to go fly kite. But until then, I personally prioritise making Singapore less and less a one-party state.

What’s “sizeable”?
I’m pretty sure that Lawrence Wong’s aware of the mindset I’ve elucidated above, because during his rally speech on Thursday night, he tried to flip the “don’t give the PAP a blank cheque” narrative around by urging voters not to “give the opposition a free pass”.

Okayyy… a free pass to do what? The power dynamics between the opposition parties and the PAP are not equal. Even if Singaporeans voted in every single WP candidate standing in GE2025, the WP still won't have sufficient numbers in Parliament to pass or block legislation. Even if Singaporeans voted in every single WP candidate and every single Progress Singapore Party candidate (the two parties represented as MPs and NCMPs in our last Parliament), they still won't have enough seats to stop the PAP from having a majority in Parliament and forming government.

Wong described the opposition presence in the previous Parliament as “sizeable”—a curious description that only makes sense if the starting point is total PAP domination. The opposition presence in the last Parliament was the largest it’d ever been, yes, but that’s because the bar in the basement. In real terms, it was still a puny number of opposition parliamentarians.

MediaCorp roundtables
Five political parties will be participating in two election forums hosted by MediaCorp on 27 April (Sunday) and 29 April (Tuesday). The parties were invited based on the number of candidates they fielded, which means that the relatively new Red Dot United (contesting 15 seats) and the People’s Alliance for Reform (contesting 13 seats) are part of the line-up, but the SDP, a much older party, isn’t and will have to find some other way to maximise their visibility.

Blocking access on Facebook
The Infocomm Media Development Authority has told Meta to block access to several Facebook posts that they say are instances of attempted foreign interference in the election. These posts were made by Iskandar Abdul Samad and Mohamed Sukri Omar of the Malaysian Islamic Party, and Zulfikar bin Mohamad Shariff, a former Internal Security Act detainee who renounced his Singaporean citizenship to take up Australian citizenship five years ago.

Party political broadcasts

The SDP was the only party to hold a rally last night—part of their effort to win over as many of the 2,500+ votes Paul Tambyah missed the last round. I suppose the rest of the parties wanted our focus to be on the first batch of party political broadcasts that went on air. They were nowhere near as exciting as a solid political rally—frankly, they were pretty boring—but they were concise, if imbalanced, opportunities for the parties to reach as many citizens as possible in the shortest amount of time.

The cost of living—the “greatest… in living memory”, said Lim Tean of People’s Alliance for Reform—was a recurring theme across the parties. Opposition parties hammered home the stressors and hardships of life in Singapore amid rising costs, emphasising the divide between the people and a dominant party they say is now more aligned to the billionaire class than the average citizen. Reno Fong of the National Solidarity Party promised his party would “build an economy that works for you—not just for the privileged few”. Ravi Philemon of RDU took aim at the PAP’s vouchers, rebates, CPF top-ups and discounts: “The handouts we get don’t build dignity. It’s not the future, it’s just about survival.”

Parties also urged Singaporeans to push for greater change. Vere Nathan Shen Li of the People’s Power Party declared that this could be Singapore’s “first real change of guard” (it won’t be, but okay). Pritam Singh made a pitch for how handing more constituencies over to the WP would increase Singapore’s chances of “a fully-elected democratic opposition presence for the longer term”. The PSP’s Tan Cheng Bock reassured Singaporeans of his party’s ability to perform the role of “loyal opposition”. Alfred Tan, representing the SDP, framed his party’s efforts as “not just an election campaign” but “a movement for change for a better tomorrow”.

As the party with the most number of candidates, Lawrence Wong was given the most airtime to articulate the PAP's position. He launched straight into how scary the world is becoming—there might even be a recession on the horizon, with retrenchment and unemployment looming. He argued that the PAP has been there for Singaporeans for decades and urged voters to give his "fresh team" a chance.

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