Politics: Lim Tean and the far right

Over a quarter of Singaporeans consider immigration to be a pressing political issue, according to Jom’s voter sentiment survey last year. But this did not translate into electoral gains for the nativist People’s Alliance for Reform (PAR). PAR obtained less than a quarter of the vote in all its contests at GE 2025; its leader, Lim Tean, lost his deposit in a three-way election for the Potong Pasir SMC. Nativism can’t seduce the multicultural Singaporean? Perhaps, though as we’ve seen from Germany to Portugal and the UK, the far-right can stun the mainstream with rapid electoral gains. Centrists ignore disgruntlement with high immigration to their own peril.

Lim this week responded to the elevation of Japan’s Sanae Takaichi with characteristic fire. The self-baptised feminist weaved together the stories of five female nationalist leaders, including Takaichi and Italy’s Giorgio Meloni, into a seductive narrative about maternal love: “No mother will want her children to be 2nd class in their own country.” Nigel Farage gets an honourable mention in a piece titled “Restricting Immigration And Populism Are Not Dirty Words !!” No, not necessarily, and to be sure, the roots of any xenophobia in Singapore are with the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP), which has long snuffed out any reasonable, transparent discussion on immigration. It’s a complex story, spanning Lee Kuan Yew’s Chinese supremacist musings, and the party’s subsequent policy from the 1980s of giving preferences to ethnic Chinese immigrants, to the more contemporary concerns with the Comprehensive Economic Cooperation Agreement (CECA), signed in 2005 between India and Singapore. 

We don’t know CECA’s actual impact, because the government doesn’t publish data on the ethnic breakdown of our non-resident population, including the number of intra-corporate transfers and their dependents who’ve moved to Singapore under CECA. But between 2004 and 2023, Singapore’s population rose 43 percent from just over 4m to just under 6m, possibly the highest growth rate of any developed country. Our birth rate is low, but how much should we grow? Ordinary Singaporeans, many experiencing job insecurity amidst a spiralling cost of living, have been excluded from that conversation. Suck it up, says a neoliberal machine addicted to growth. Opposition parties, like the Progress Singapore Party, that try to fairly interrogate immigration’s dynamics are quickly painted into a racist corner.

And they’re outflanked on the right by the Lims of the world. Whatever the merits of his socio-economic arguments, they’re delivered with dangerous rhetoric that's previously led to horrid anti-Indian sentiment. He relies on dehumanising dog whistles. Immigrants “swarm” Europe, he said this week; one commenter criticised Singapore for “desperately taking in the trash from mainly third world countries”. In order to neuter the appeal of such inflammatory language and xenophobia, the PAP must be completely transparent with immigration, population and jobs data. This will foster a more honest conversation about the Singapore we want.