The announcement in the present day by Singapore’s Lee Hsien Loong that he would step down because the nation’s third prime minister by November 21, 2024, brings down a tentative curtain on what is among the longest-running political succession convolutions in Southeast Asia for what is usually described because the “Lee Dynasty.”
Lee Hsien Loong, the 71-year-old chief of a fantastically affluent metropolis state molded solely within the picture of his late father Lee Kuan Yew, who died in 2015, passes the baton to Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Finance Lawrence Wong, ending months of hypothesis over the succession, which has been messy and extended. Talking at an annual awards conference held by the ruling Folks’s Motion Social gathering (PAP), Lee mentioned he intends for the management transition to occur earlier than the 70th anniversary of the PAP’s founding and the subsequent normal election, due earlier than November 2025 “if all goes properly.”
Certainly, the phrase “if all goes properly” raised suspicions among the many cynical that he might properly be tempted to grab the reins if issues go awry. Few anticipate Hsien Loong to totally retire from nationwide politics altogether, given the probability he’ll serve on as a “Senior Minister” or “Minister Mentor” as his father did after stepping down as prime minister in 1990, and additional accentuated by his declaration of readiness to “go wherever (Lawrence Wong) thinks I might be helpful” in serving to the PAP underneath its fourth-generation management workforce to contest the subsequent normal election.
The selection of Wong to be Singapore’s fourth premier was not clear minimize from the beginning. Authentic plans for Hsien Loong handy over energy to then-Deputy Prime Minister Heng Swee Keat fizzled in April 2021 when he introduced that on the age of 60, he felt that he could be too previous for the job (euphemistically described by Heng as “too quick a runway”) and raised hypothesis that Hsien Loong had soured on him. This got here lower than a 12 months after Hsien Loong in July 2020 known as for a delay within the transition owing to the Covid-19 pandemic, and virtually three years after Emeritus Senior Minister Goh Chok Tong expressed his need for the PAP’s fourth era management post-Lee Hsien Loong to be settled by 2018. Goh Chok Tong was Singapore’s second prime minister between 1990 and 2004, serving as the one non-Lee interregnum within the nation’s prime management between the Lee father and son.
Lawrence Wong gained the competition to be Singapore’s fourth premier in April 2022 by way of a secret cupboard vote, beating out earlier frontrunners resembling Ministers Chan Chun Sing (Commerce and Trade, Public Service, Training) and Ong Ye Kung (Transport, Well being) owing to his efficiency and rising public persona because the co-chair however de-facto chief of Singapore’s Multi-Ministry Activity Power (MMTF) in the course of the Covid-19 pandemic. Wong beforehand served in numerous ministerial-level appointments starting from communications and nationwide growth to schooling and finance in addition to previous civil service work underneath Singapore’s commerce, finance, and well being ministries. That is on prime of additionally serving as Hsien Loong’s principal personal secretary between 2005 and 2008 previous to his entry into politics in 2011. Since his anointing as PM-in-waiting in April 2022, Singaporean state media have launched into a concerted marketing campaign to cement his standing as “first amongst equals” throughout the fourth-generation PAP management, in addition to a non-orthodox PAP politician who is just not the archetypal soldier-scholar, Oxbridge-educated Anglophile.
Nevertheless, it can’t be assumed that choice might be as clean a transition in fashionable voter enchantment for both himself or the PAP, as had been the case in Singapore’s solely two management transitions to date in its impartial historical past. As Minister of Finance since 2021, Lawrence Wong’s flagship public coverage has been asserting the elevating of Singapore’s Items and Providers Tax (GST) from 7 % to 9 % in two tranches by 2024. That is regardless of ongoing rising inflation and price of dwelling ranges in Singapore, making the nation repeatedly one among, if not the costliest nations on this planet to reside in by numerous metrics, and flying within the face of previous political rhetoric by Hsien Loong stating that solely “profligate spending and irresponsible, unsustainable plans will harm and require you to boost taxes and GST”.
On this mild, Hsien Loong’s announcement of Wong’s elevation by November 2024 earlier than normal elections are due a 12 months later has a robust sense of sizzling potato-passing, because it successfully implies that Wong must politically entrance and personal the GST tax rise and its potential penalties on the PAP’s political fortunes. No matter justifications alongside the traces of saving and funding public funds and social spending, it’s by no means a very good search for any politician (a lot much less a prime management contender) to name for larger taxation when public society is as a substitute calling for controlling inflation and reducing costs.
Moreover, if opinion polls are to be believed, Wong seems to be set to have a tough trip of convincing voters that he and his fourth-generation PAP management workforce have what it takes to guide the nation. A survey performed by the Singapore authorities’s Institute of Coverage Research (IPS) thinktank proper after Wong’s preliminary anointing as PM-in-waiting between April and Might 2022 threw up some doubtlessly regarding statistics: solely six of 10 Singaporeans trusted that the PAP authorities discovered the very best fourth-generation chief to navigate divisions inside native society. Wong’s private approval rankings solely come as much as 59 % with him solely having fun with a easy majority help amongst those that have a college diploma schooling or extra (59 %), and missing help from these with solely a post-secondary diploma (44 %) or decrease degree of schooling (49 %).
That is in distinction to the recently-elected President of Singapore Tharman Shanmugaratnam, who repeatedly commanded fashionable vote percentages throughout all segments of society between 74 to 80 % all through his political profession as a PAP minister since 2001 earlier than his retirement from politics to run for President in July 2023. Certainly, such was the elephant within the room about Tharman’s non-anointing as PM-in-waiting regardless of his glorious public help rankings way back to 2016, that in 2019 the earlier PM-in-waiting Heng Swee Keat brazenly said in a now-infamous comment that “Singapore was not but prepared for a non-Chinese language prime minister.” The irony is just not misplaced that Heng would publicly decline to be Singapore’s subsequent prime minister barely two years later.
Questions stay to be requested if anointment is a blessing or curse to each his private political fortunes, in addition to that of the PAP he’s to guide into the subsequent normal election. Given the historical past of Singapore’s political management successions, many suspect that like Goh Chok Tong, Wong will turn into one other benchwarmer for a future Lee scion, regardless of what number of publicly state any lack of curiosity in politics in the present day.
