Nobody’s independent: Singapore’s presidential election
"Singaporeans elect a new president from the three people the government has deemed fit to run: Ng Kok Song, former GIC chief investment officer (CIO), Tan Kin Lian, former boss of NTUC Income, and Tharman Shanmugaratnam, former senior minister with the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP).
If character, competence and experience were the yardsticks by which voters choose, Tharman, respected across the political spectrum, would be a shoo-in. That he isn’t speaks to several issues with this problematic office, including its troubling origins in Lee Kuan Yew’s paranoia about losing power; the undemocratic and sometimes opaque nature of the qualifying process; the ambiguities about the role; the misalignment in expectations about the role between the establishment and the electorate; and the relentless tinkering by the PAP over the decades with the qualifying criteria, seemingly to install politically aligned presidents.
All this has caused among the electorate deep disillusionment with the elected presidency. Many generally regard it as a frivolous exercise. For some, it’s a chance to cast a protest vote against the PAP. This year, a “spoil vote” movement has emerged. Despite some enthusiasm about overseas Singaporeans being able to vote by post for the first time, Friday’s election is in many ways less a celebration of democracy than an obligatory ritual. It’s important to understand the origins of this apathy before assessing the three candidates.
Before 1991, Parliament appointed Singapore’s president, who served as a ceremonial head of state. The genesis of the elected presidency can be traced to 1981, when JB Jeyaretnam of the Workers’ Party (WP) won a by-election and broke the PAP’s 14-year stranglehold of Parliament. This scared Lee Kuan Yew. In 1984, he worried about a “freak election” delivering to office free-spending charlatans, who might raid and deplete our reserves. That’s when he first mooted the idea of an elected president as a possible check on a rogue government.
Seven years later, the Constitution of the Republic of Singapore (Amendment) Act 1991 revamped the role, duties, and selection mechanism of Singapore’s presidency. Chief among these changes were the president’s new veto powers over the use of Singapore’s reserves and key public service appointments, and the need to elect the president so they have the mandate to do all that. Only those who’d held a senior position in government or led a big corporation would qualify automatically to run. Despite changes since then, those remain the core powers and the guiding philosophy for eligibility.
Given that incumbent Wee Kim Wee had two years left of his term, the first presidential election was held in 1993, pitting Ong Teng Cheong, a former deputy prime minister with the PAP, against Chua Kim Yeow, Singapore’s first auditor-general. The LA Times reported that Richard Hu, finance minister, persuaded Chua to run. So reluctant was Chua that he admitted that he was running out of a sense of “public duty”, and that he considered Ong “a far superior candidate”. The Straits Times (ST) published a letter from an irate citizen: “I am greatly dismayed and disappointed by Chua Kim Yeow’s approach to his candidacy for president.”
Even after endorsing his opponent, Chua still garnered 41.3 percent of the vote. A now-popular adage among establishment folk emerged: even if one puts up a monkey, they’ll still get 40 percent of the vote.
Further complications would follow for Lee, because the new president Ong—how dare he—actually tried to do his job. He wanted to understand the size of the reserves he was charged with protecting. In 1996, when Ong asked for a valuation of the state’s physical assets, the accountant-general irritated him by responding that it would take 56 man-years to compute. “Oftentimes, senior civil servants found him ‘a pest’ and told him that the scheme only required him to check ‘the bad guys’, not the current government,” wrote academics Cherian George and Kevin Tan in “Why Singapore’s next elected President should be one of its last”.
Ong fell out of favour with his former party colleagues. In declining to seek re-election in 1999, he spoke about a “long list” of problems he had faced as president. The government issued a point-by-point rebuttal. When Ong passed away in 2002, he received only a “state-assisted” funeral, not a full state funeral as other leaders, including his predecessor Wee, had enjoyed.
The treatment that Singapore’s very first elected president received did not bode well for the office. The second elected president, SR Nathan (1999-2011), elected twice in walkovers, downplayed the office’s discretionary powers given that there was, in his view, a good government in charge. In 2011, amid broader political liberalisation, another problem emerged for the establishment.
Lee had believed that the stringent qualifying criteria would limit the presidency to figures friendly to the PAP, noted George and Tan. But he hadn’t counted on “breakaway establishment figures” vying for the role. The most important of these in 2011 was Tan Cheng Bock, a former PAP member of Parliament, and current chairman of the Progress Singapore Party, who ran against Tony Tan, the PAP’s preferred candidate, in an election featuring four Chinese men surnamed Tan.
Tony Tan won with 35.2 percent of the vote, with Tan Cheng Bock just 0.35 of a percentage point behind, with 34.85 percent. Tan Jee Say, a former civil servant, won 25.04 percent and Tan Kin Lian, a candidate this year too, won 4.91 percent.
With its preferred candidate having come within a whisker of losing in 2011, the PAP was shaken. A slew of constitutional changes followed ahead of the 2017 election. Most contentious was the affirmative action tweak: if a particular racial group had not been represented as president for five terms, or 30 years, then the subsequent presidential election would be open only to them. This effectively reserved the 2017 election for Malays. Critics perceived this move similarly to the creation of the Group Representation Constituency system in 1988—an attempt by the PAP to instrumentalise race for political gain. “Tan Cheng Block,” some cried.
The other important change was that private sector candidates henceforth had to lead companies with at least S$500m in shareholders’ equity to qualify, up from S$100m in paid-up capital. This change meant that both Farid Khan and Mohamed Salleh Marican, who may have easily qualified under 2011’s rules, were unable to do so in 2017. Likewise, for George Goh this year. Critics believe that all these changes make an institution that’s inherently undemocratic even more so. Based on minister Chan Chun Sing’s comments earlier this year, Jom calculated that only 0.044 percent of Singaporean adult citizens can easily qualify to run for president.
While the government accepted the Constitutional Commission’s recommendations in 2016 on tightening the criteria for the private sector, it rejected those for the public sector: minimum six years in a qualifying office. If it had also accepted that recommendation, Halimah wouldn’t have qualified—she’d been speaker for only four years. As it turned out, she was elected in a walkover.
This was the most questionable Singaporean election in recent memory, and not only because Tan Cheng Bock, Farid and Salleh couldn’t contest. Ugly complications emerged ahead of the election. Citizens learned that Halimah’s official race on her identity card is “Indian”, following her father. Yet, she claimed to be Malay and was accepted by the community as such. Interrogations into the salience of ethnic identities and classifications ensued online.
Many Singaporeans had by then been making genuine attempts to carve out space for granular meaning and identity within those broad yet limiting buckets, “Chinese”, “Malay”, “Indian” and “Others”. But the transactional way the PAP was seen to be treating race meant that public discourse was a reductionist one, about the PAP and Halimah’s perceived opportunism. It was often accompanied by racially charged terms, like makcik (auntie).
To rub salt in the wound, in Parliament in February 2017, Chan called Halimah, then speaker, “Madam President” twice. Many colleagues laughed along with him. This was months before Halimah had even confirmed she’d be standing for the election in September, and well before Farid and Salleh’s applications were considered. Senior PAP politicians appeared to possess some electoral clairvoyance.
One can trace a clear line of voter bewilderment from the apparent charade of the first election in 1993, and the problems Ong, a party stalwart, subsequently faced as first president, all the way to 2017, and the manner in which Halimah entered office. The elected presidency remains the largest constitutional amendment, having added 30 percent more content to the Constitution itself. Penat lah, tired, is how many Singaporeans feel about the whole show.
Even though Lee Kuan Yew envisioned the elected presidency as a possible check on a non-PAP profligate government, it’s evolved in a way that many citizens now see it as a potential check on PAP hegemony. This is the underlying reason why there is so much democratic dissonance leading up to it...
For liberals, the disillusionment with Tharman stems from the persistent feeling that he’s not as progressive on socio-economic issues as they want him to be. This has its roots in the late 1970s and 1980s, and the hope invested in Tharman, the young student activist and leftist. “The sharpest mind of our generation”, as KC Chew, Tharman’s friend since secondary school, told Jom.
That generation’s desire for socio-political liberalisation would be rudely halted by 1987’s Operation Spectrum, when the government arrested and detained without trial 22 church workers, opposition volunteers, and activists, including Chew, claiming they were “Marxist conspirators” plotting to overthrow the state.
While many remained outside the system, Tharman went on to enjoy a long career in public service. He rose to managing director of the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) before resigning to join the PAP and stand for election in 2001. If this was perceived as him selling out, a month following the election Tharman, in an interview with ST, publicly stood up for his former leftist comrades who’d been arrested in 1987, saying that “...from what I knew of them, most were social activists but were not out to subvert the system.” (He’s done so recently again on the campaign trail.)...
Elections in most democracies are usually opportunities for citizens to
revel in the marvel of joint decision-making, of collective choice, of
living in a system where citizens are empowered to choose their leaders.
But Friday’s presidential election in Singapore will be a reminder
mostly of how convoluted the practice of democracy here has become. And
how that, itself, is a symptom of a rather depressing aspect of being
Singaporean: our leaders simply don’t trust our judgement."
