There is a widely held view that Singapore needs both PAP government and more opposition. To achieve this, Singaporeans need to pay attention to politics in between elections and do their part to build a democratic society.

The opposition’s stars filled rally grounds and animated everyday conversations. In the previous general election, it had made a big breakthrough, winning more seats and pulling down the PAP’s vote share. Surely, Singapore was poised to take a few more steps away from one-party dominance. But, on Polling Day, the electorate sent the opposition straight into a brick wall. Many Singaporeans were deeply disappointed.

This could be a description of Singapore this May, 2025. 

Or I could be describing 2015. 

Or 1997. 

All these were election years when the previous poll’s quantum leap in opposition fortunes was followed by a big, resounding — nothing. The opposition’s momentum stalled. The ruling party maintained or improved its seat count and increased its vote share. 

Struggling to comprehend last weekend’s GE results? We have been here before.

I don’t bring up history to deepen anyone’s sense of futility but to suggest that if we are not to repeat it, Singaporeans might need to rethink their tendency to pay attention to politics only when elections come along.

A shared unease

PAP cheerleaders would have us believe that only the one-third of Singaporeans who voted for the opposition last Saturday feel let down by the result. They claim the silent majority has spoken. But has it?

Election results in Singapore are hard to interpret, because many Singaporeans want both a larger opposition and stable PAP rule. This paradox means that the 34.43 percent who voted opposition last Saturday would include people who favour continued PAP government for now. But, by the same token, many among the 65.57 percent who voted for the PAP probably wished the opposition would win more seats — but somewhere else; because, in their own constituencies, they were not offered opposition candidates who met their standards. These PAP voters were probably rooting for a few opposition candidates running elsewhere.

We know that Singaporeans are highly sensitive to opposition candidate quality. Who’s running — not voters’ values, demographics, or opinions on policy — must be the main reason why, for instance, voters in Ang Mo Kio GRC were twice as likely to vote for the PAP than voters in Aljunied GRC. This also explains the large and growing gap in PAP support in seats contested by the WP and those contested by other opposition parties. If a major predictor of the vote share is who’s standing in each constituency, we shouldn’t read the results as clear indications of where Singaporeans stand on particular issues.

For example, it would be obviously foolish to claim that the two-thirds of Singaporeans who voted for the PAP are fine with the cost of living. (And the PAP has not suggested that.) It is as illogical to argue that that all of these Singaporeans are equally happy that no additional opposition members were elected to Parliament. Elections are not referenda on specific questions — whehter it’s the cost of living or the size of the opposition — and cannot be read as such.

We have to look elsewhere for a clearer idea of what Singaporeans want. Institute of Policy Studies public opinion surveys show that only a minority can be described as “conservative” — that is, people who disagree that there is need for change in the electoral system; for checks and balances; and for different voices in Parliament. The proportion of conservatives peaked at around 44 percent in 2015, the year Lee Kuan Yew died. In other years, it hovers at around just 20 percent.

“Swing” voters, who make up the largest group in most years, rank an efficient government more highly than parliamentary checks and balances, while “pluralist” voters consider parliamentary checks and balances to be more important. But even swing voters say parliamentary checks and balances are very important (45 percent) or important (53 percent).

This data suggest that most Singaporeans do want the opposition to grow steadily. To varying degrees, most are probably disappointed that GE2025 did not yield another 1, 5, or 10 seats to qualified opposition candidates. 

These Singaporeans are the real silenced majority. They are under-represented in a public sphere that amplifies conservative voices and mutes critical ones. And, in the 15th Parliament, they will be further marginalised by the first-past-the-post system, whereby a 34 percent vote share for the opposition translates into a mere 10 percent of elected seats. This is a serious disequilibrium in our system of representative government. 

A lose-lose-lose disequilibrium

Parliament’s chronic under-representation of Singaporeans’ desire for more checks and balances is not healthy. Not even for the PAP. Parliament — along with national news media and universities — coddles ministers, increasing the risk of groupthink that arises from the lack of diversity within cabinet. It makes even the brightest ones intellectually lazy over time, generating an embarrassing series of policy and political missteps over the years. A lack of voice also makes Singaporeans more irritable, perhaps too harsh sometimes on decent PAP leaders and other hardworking public servants, and too forgiving of failings on the opposition side.

This is why more thoughtful PAP leaders have welcomed opposition growth. In 2020, when the Workers’ Party won Sengkang GRC and the PAP’s vote share fell 8.7 points,  Senior Minister Tharman Shanmugaratnam acknowledged that the result reflected “a desire among Singaporeans for a new balance in politics” and would encourage the PAP “to review its own game so as to win the hearts, and not just the minds, of a changing electorate”.

Similarly, when the Workers’ Party won its first GRC in 2011 and the PAP vote share hit a historic low, former Deputy Prime Minister and Presidential candidate Tony Tan called it a win-win-win outcome. He said it was a “net plus” for Singapore, “another stage of our political development as a country”. In this “new normal”, a “strong party in government” would be “matched by an effective opposition in Parliament”. 

So, we should ignore the PAP’s strident, tone-deaf ideologues inebriated by this month’s result. Reasonable Singaporeans, including those who support the PAP, have good reason to feel disappointed that the opposition’s gradual progress stalled.

In the coming weeks, Prime Minister Lawrence Wong will show if he is sensitive to this fact or if he’s going to be swayed by party cheerleaders. He has passed the first, rather easy, test. Ng Chee Meng is out of the running for a Cabinet position. Rewarding with high office an obviously flawed public servant who almost lost to a newbie would strike most — including many PAP voters — as a declaration that the PAP can get away with anything, and intends to.

There is much more the Prime Minister could do to work towards a more balanced political system. In the past, when the government sensed public disquiet about the lack of diverse voices in Parliament, it introduced reforms such as the Non-Constituency MP scheme. It also shrunk the size of GRCs to make the elections more contestable. Singaporean expectations may have already outgrown these stop-gap measures, so it may be time to come up with other structural changes.

Wong could also decide that his government is going to respect Singaporeans enough to try to win arguments through debate and persuasion, instead of by using its power to shut their mouths and seal their ears. He can impose a moratorium on the use of POFMA notices and defamation lawsuits when simple clarifications would do the job of setting the record straight. He can instruct the Ministry of Home Affairs and Ministry of Education to end the outrageous practice of blacklisting young Singaporeans with a civil society background from employment in universities.

Enlightened self-interest should encourage the PAP to change from within, as Donald Low and I argued in PAP v PAP. But we should also learn from the history of Singapore’s start-stop, tortuously slow democratic development that we cannot leave it to the incumbents to reform without stronger pressure.

WP: No fluke

Fortunately, the opposition has never looked more capable. Indeed, this is the main reason why many Singaporeans found the GE results frustrating. Decades ago, Singaporeans groaned at the low quality of opposition candidates, many of whom earned mostly sympathy or protest votes. Now, you instead hear Singaporeans despairing at their fellow citizens, wondering if anything will stir them to board the slow train toward a more democratic Singapore. 

The Workers’ Party no longer needs to milk sympathy or whip up anger. And it has shown that 2020 was no fluke. GE2025 is the second election running where the WP received more votes than the PAP, by a hair’s breadth, in seats where they competed head-to-head for Singaporeans’ support. The WP’s vote share this month was again just over 50 percent. The fact that it repeated this feat on an electoral terrain 30 percent larger than in 2020 shows it can grow without compromising quality. The party leadership clearly knows what it’s doing and can be counted on to keep improving. Since 2011, the WP has run more disciplined, on-message election campaigns than the PAP. In between elections, it works hard on the ground. 

Back in the 1980s and 1990s, Lee Kuan Yew mocked opposition parties as one-man shows, contrasting them with the PAP’s induction system that systematically creamed off Singapore’s most able. You don’t hear that critique anymore. Since 2011, the WP has maintained a recruitment system that is as good as, if not superior to, the PAP’s. Its candidates are as credentialed and they articulate better what drives them to stand. Kenneth Paul Tan was on to something when he boldly declared that the PAP was showing signs of decadence. In comparison, the WP appears dynamic. 

But, as promising as the WP is, it is unrealistic to delegate the work of building democracy entirely to it and other opposition parties. If we continue to do so, we are doomed to repeat the stop-start cycle endlessly. At this rate of progress, humans will set foot on Mars before Singaporeans have a balanced Parliament and a political system befitting the country’s complexity and diversity. 

Time for society to step up

The last time I checked, our National Pledge doesn’t say that we the citizens of Singapore will watch as politicians build a democratic society. We pledge to do the building ourselves. A democratic society rests on broad foundations and rises on multiple pillars. There is only so much opposition parties can do through electoral politics if the rest of Singapore’s democratic infrastructure resembles a feudal or colonial town where power and privilege are protected behind high walls, while challengers eke out a precarious existence on the margins. 

There are two pillars that civil society should rally to repair: the system for drawing electoral boundaries and the national media. There is already a middle ground of opposition and PAP supporters who need no persuading that these essential infrastructures are patently unfair. 

Less than eight weeks before Polling Day, the Electoral Boundaries Review Committee reconfigured GRCs that major opposition parties had invested in after coming close the previous round. Working under the Prime Minister’s Office, its decisions violated the commonsense principles adopted by Singapore’s founding fathers in the 1950s, such as making it easier for candidates to canvas for votes and respecting people’s mental maps of their neighbourhoods. The government’s various statements defending the Committee insult the public’s intelligence. Justifications for the latest round of changes were deservedly mocked. But instead of post-hoc criticism that only serves to let off steam, citizens need to push for reform now. The day after Polling Day, when Pritam Singh was asked about the need to mend this system, he indicated that the WP would not lead the charge. It would be up to the public, since “nothing is more powerful than the people’s voice”. 

As for the national media, the Straits Times and its sister newspapers have steadily declined in quality since the 2011 General Election. Since the 2021 restructuring essentially nationalised the country’s news industry, editors no longer try to hide the fact that their livelihoods depend on serving their political masters, not listening to their journalists who want to do a professional job nor the public that is forced to fund them through their taxes. By the end of the campaign, the papers did not bother to hide their partisan colours, denying the public an impartial source of news about the election. When the minister for information defends the performance of government-funded news media by citing vague circulation figures and selective survey data, most listeners, including many PAP voters, know they are being gaslit.

These are just two areas of necessary reform that cannot be left to opposition parties, and cannot wait till a month before the next general election for citizens to pay attention. If civil society groups start working on these issues, I hope that the broader public will lend them its support.

Achieving major structural change within the next few years will be difficult. But citizens have to start somewhere. And a serious, concerted effort on these two fronts could produce short term dividends. The government could be pressured to provide assurances that this year’s closely fought GRCs will not be unfairly tampered with in the next review. And it could ease up on its micromanagement of the press.

Singaporeans can continue to treat democracy as a once-in-five-year reality show to binge-watch — which means it is now time to turn off till the next season. But if they learn anything from the pattern of Singapore’s slow and fitful democratic progress, it should be that  a critical mass of citizens is needed to help build a fairer political system in between GEs.

The antidote for despondency is to work hard. Pritam Singh, understands this. In his first speech after the GE, his words punched through the disappointment hanging heavy in the air: “We start work again tomorrow and we go again.” 

Singaporeans, whichever party they voted for, must now decide if the opposition will have to continue going it alone, or if they will join in and go together.