reduced and recycled

The disappointment set in pretty early on the 6th of May, 2006. By about 11.30pm, it had become apparent how Singaporeans have voted. It was nearly 2.00am when I sat listening to Lee Hsien Loong delivering a press statement on the state of the union, such as it is. I expected things to be moving really fast, now that the elections are over, and I didn’t have long to wait. Within a day of the election results airing, James Gomez was stopped at the airport while attempting to leave the country.

He must’ve known what would happen, and like clockwork, the PAP didn’t disappoint. He is, I understand, under arrest for ‘criminal intimidation’. According to a news report I heard on FM98.7, he’s already endured an 8-hour “interview” with the Police on the charge of criminal intimidation brought against him by the Elections Commission, a department run by the PAP.

I learned about this only last night, but I saw the same report in the NST today, as I was having my breakfast. That brought to mind some of the things I’ve been wanting to say regarding the elections, and in particular, Lee Hsien Loong’s statement.

The new mandate?

He had a strong mandate, he said on national TV. Today, I heard Minister Mentor Lee also proclaim that his son had obtained a strong mandate, making a point about reaching the younger strata of voters. The mantra of a strong mandate hasn’t died down since the early hours of the 7th of May, so hearing it again and again has started to irritate me just a little.

Repeating an assertion doesn’t make it a fact.

In any other country with strong, representative opposition parties and fair rules of engagement, a 66.6% margin is a huge deal; to have won this many votes means the people are, overwhelmingly, on your side. I hate how that sounds like sour grapes, but when you’re the incumbent, and you wield a big stick and your opponents are fighting with both hands tied behind their backs, you can’t help but expect a complete and utter trouncing.

This did not happen. Also, Mr Lee was returned to power on a mid-60% vote in his own Ang Mo Kio GRC, facing a group of young, untried Worker’s Party candidates. When questioned about his mandate in his own GRC, Mr Lee supplied a non-answer answer lasting no more than about five seconds.

Unfortunately, no journalist appeared foolhardy enough to point out to Mr Lee the differences between 66.6% ‘mandate’ obtained this year and the 75% mandate obtained in 2001. His answer would’ve been interesting, and I’ve already heard stories/newsbits about the 2001 elections coming at the heels of the September 11th terrorist attacks. What the correlation means, I do not know; perhaps only news-makers know.

I suppose we could point out the fact, in Mr Lee’s favour, that of the 84 seats up for grabs, the PAP won an overwhelming 82 seats in government. However, of the 82 seats won, 37 were uncontested walkovers.

A walkover, unfortunately, is not assent to the PAP. Slick electoral boundary management, however, is something the Malaysian government should pick up on and learn from! With the deft shifting of electoral lines, the other guys might get one-third of the vote, but only win 2 of 47 seats!

The ‘poor showing’ in the face of ‘newbies’; reliance on shifting boundaries and the drop in support that went over to the Worker’s Party: what mandate does Mr Lee actually mean?

FUD is the new cool

FUD’s actually old skool as far as the PAP is concerned. They did it with Chee Soon Juan, they did it with JB Jeyaratnam and they’ve done it with James Gomez. There’s nothing more chilling, or more cutting, then losing to your opponent, and then facing consequences for your loss - or if you do win, to face the prospect of litigation at every turn of the corner. It’s something the PAP haven’t experienced much, I’m sure, but something they understand very well.

As with almost every election, discussion of issues are kept at minimum. This is only possible by reference to past good management of the economy, meaning that a vote for the PAP is a vote for continued prosperity - prosperity, that is, evident by last minute progress packages or disbursements by large government linked corporations. There is nothing more troubling than the prospect of not being able to provide for your children - you can’t face the spectre of uncertainty stoicly when it isn’t about you, but about your kids.

The Opposition, unfortunately, are only left with issues to fight. They don’t have the requisite experience in government, and hardly any credentials to that effect. The PAP, however, have lined their top posts with people who are or were in charge of large government-linked corporations, presenting on the surface a veneer of managerial, if not technical, competence. And this seems to work time and again when people are faced with the PAP’s FUD tactics.

This is actually in surprising contrast to Malaysian politics, where positions of power are obtained through loyalty, patronage and one’s personality; the last throwbacks of this in the Singapore political scene, it appears, are Mr Low Thia Kiang, and the now-disgraced Chee Soon Juan and JB Jeyaratnam. In forcing personalities out the door, the PAP have effectively created a playing field in which the rules are defined by the incumbent. You can see how this works when both senior and junior Lee admit, grudgingly it appears, that the Opposition was more credible this time ‘round.

But I think we shouldn’t be fooled.

The PAP forces the Opposition to play the technicalities and move away from a personality- and populist-driven politics, and then it trumps the Opposition by banking on its experience in managing the economy. So while the Opposition are forced to fight the issues, the PAP is allowed to neatly sidestep them and point back to the past. The people, therefore, are left with an Opposition that has nothing to offer but untested ideas and objections/accusations that are perceived to be baseless and without the benefit of experience. It’s quite breathtaking actually.

And all of this just drives doubt and uncertainty. It’s a tactic that won’t go away, I think, and it appears that the only cure for this is an informed electorate knowing what issues are at stake. The likelihood of this happening, fortunately, is quite high; if the large margins won and scenes at Opposition party rallies are anything to go by, it appears as if there are, increasingly, a larger number of young people choosing to be politically engaged. This bodes well, but whether it’s enough to overcome the assumed technical superiority of the PAP is still something to be seen.

Before the Empire strikes back…

Prior or during the elections, a clear warning was issued to the internet community and bloggers in particular: do NOT talk about the elections, or else face a fine or X month jail term. About two days into the week before the elections, one of the Lee’s came right out and warned podcasters, vloggers and bloggers that about 2,000 blogs were being monitored by, presumably, the authorities.

Bloggers laughed, and then laughed some more. Those with the benefit of being off-country, and using servers that aren’t based in Singapore have little to fear: they are, for all intents and purposes, untraceable and anonymous. The ones that live in Singapore and persist despite these new “laws” or pronouncements, these are the ones in danger of a response from the authorities. And yet they persisted, giving unprecedented coverage, and it warms my cockles that they have done so.

The Straits Times of Singapore covered the elections in a manner many punters have become familiar with: skewed, and providing only a portion of a portion of coverage allocated to the Opposition parties, it appears. The rest of the Home Section carried pages upon pages of PAP views and the usual PAP recriminations against the Opposition. The James Gomez saga took up even more space, and was drummed into the public in as many days.

ChannelNewsAsia, run by Mediacorp, had some really bone-melting, hair-raising commentaries, the sort you’d expect to find in political tracts and pamphlets. It appears that nothing beats the Straits Times in reporting drama and hubris. You’d be justified in believing they reported fiction rather than news. Which made them the perfect foil for online bloggers who didn’t merely present opinions, but provided more coverage to Opposition party rallies than it had ever had, I think.

It’s been only two days since the election results were announced. James Gomez was arrested only a day after the results, and what the government will eventually choose to do to Singaporean bloggers remains to be seen. Promises to ‘study’ the blogging and/or online phenomenon sound ominous. I think it will be inevitable that the government will link the impact of greater electoral gains in the Opposition camp to online coverage of the elections.

The government had, previously, charged three Singaporean bloggers for engaging in bigot speech on the internet; there the lines appeared to have been drawn very clearly - you break the law, you will be prosecuted. It was a sign of a more hands-on approach to regulating the blogsphere, so I don’t think anyone should surprised if the PAP government actively pursues dissenting bloggers.

The changing political landscape

A decreased mandate, a more active and participatory Opposition, a more politically active citizenry and a greater availability of views: it all looks so promising. When Lee Hsien Loong promised a more open society, I doubt he meant for a Singapore that was beginning to imagine itself without the PAP.

When I was still in varsity, I used to argue for the PAP, strangely enough. It wasn’t because I disagreed with the Opposition - I just disagreed with Oppositions run by personalities. They raised issues, of course, but those issues were reactionary - there wasn’t a sense at the time that the Opposition presented a credible alternative, by which I mean a fully functional alternative government.

And, there are peculiar aspects to the birth of Singapore. The argument, in the past, that Singapore was a small state surrounded by hostiles, and on the edge of survival, rang true for me. The city-state had no time for the bickering and community-itis prevalent in so many functional democracies; you can’t have a committee deciding what to do when you’re worried about what to feed your people, you must act, and you must act decisively.

The best way for this is, clearly, an unquestioned, autocratic style of government. In Singapore’s case, that autocracy was centred around Lee Kuan Yew and his cadre of lieutenants who, one by one, were discarded when their views became contrary to his.

In Malaysia, bitter critics of the government are wont to say: “you get the government you deserve”. In Singapore’s case, in the early years, I have no doubt that Singaporeans got “the government they needed”. Whether the same geopolitical realities hold true is a question that can only be answered by reference to the past actions of Singapore’s neighbours.

Hence, the Confrontation will always remain the minds of those who have experienced it, and having experienced, they will also assume that yet another Confrontation is possible. But, as even the PAP realize, the generations which they led, and were closest to these tumultuous events, are now giving way to a generation fed and grown on prosperity.

While the previous generations had many things to fear (the Confrontation, the Communist insurgency, Malaysia), the current and upcoming generation fear only two things: their government, and their rice bowls. While it is darkly ironic that the government that sought to allay the fears of the people are now themselves the tyrants, there is I think no doubt that the people are now, finally, finding their voices.