Politics: Glee

Some expected gloating at the recent People’s Action Party (PAP) Awards and Convention, the first party shindig since May’s electoral success. Lawrence Wong, party secretary-general and prime minister, spoke with relish of the well-wishers who apologised after GE2025 for having doubted the PAP’s chances. “We should have more confidence in you,” confessed those of little faith. He also blamed the opposition for portraying the global cost-of-living crisis as a local one—never mind that academics have repeatedly pointed out local factors too—stoking “anxiety and frustration”. But Singaporeans saw through such chicanery. “They tell me, ‘Thank you for the vouchers. Please give us more.’” Wong tittered, and the assembly tittered with him, jubilant aristocrats smug in their own largesse towards a society dependent on handouts. 

More puzzling was when he spoke about the PAP’s win in Tampines GRC. A loss there “would have signalled that the Workers’ Party’s [WP’s] calculated appeal to the Malay-Muslim community had been effective.” Presumably, he meant the WP’s decision to move Faisal Manap from Aljunied to lead its Tampines team against the one led by PAP’s Masagos Zulkifli, then Minister-in-charge of Muslim Affairs. The affrontery. How dare a party strategise for an election. You wouldn’t catch the PAP parachuting two young working mothers to wrest an opposition GRC full of young families. And there’s no way they would move a deputy prime minister from a constituency where he’s walked the ground for two decades to one he has no connection with, to stymie a strong opposition team. “The opposite of making a calculated move is to make an uncalculated, random, or unthoughtful move,” wrote Ian Chong, NUS academic, wondering which political party worth its salt would do that.

Maybe Wong was hinting at the Noor Deros episode. That’s a distraction. The PAP was nearly unseated by first-time opposition—it won by around 6,000 votes in a 148,000-strong GRC—because, as observers have noted, there was discontent over the tudung issue among others, and because the WP fielded high-calibre, non-Malay candidates too. Framing GE2025’s closest contest in ethnic terms was reductive as well as insulting to the tens of thousands who voted against the ruling party, to say nothing of the efforts of its own popular leaders like Baey Yam Keng. Much of this was mere speechifying, the release of nervous energy with comrades who’ve helped the party to a historic win in a tense election. But always, from behind the platitudes and the gratitude, the overt humility and modesty, sticks out a dominant strand in the party’s DNA: support is wisdom; dissent, folly.