Singapore’s People’s Action Party (PAP) won a significant victory at the country’s election on Saturday, in Prime Minister Lawrence Wong’s first electoral test since taking office last year.
The PAP secured 65.57 percent of the national vote, improving on its 2020 performance by 4 percentage points, and won 87 of the 97 seats in Parliament. The party prevailed in all of the most hotly contested constituencies, including the East Coast Group Representation Constituency (GRC) and West Coast-Jurong West GRC, and “extended its margin of victory in several areas,” Channel News Asia reported.
In the previous election in 2020, the PAP won 61.24 percent of the votes and 83 of the 93 seats in parliament. However, the party’s support fell 9 percent from the general election of 2015, while the dogged opposition Workers’ Party (WP) increased its share of parliamentary seats to 10.
In a press conference early Sunday, Wong said that he was “deeply humbled and grateful” by the support shown to his party. “It is a clear signal of trust, stability and confidence in your government,” he told reporters and party members. “The results will put Singapore in a better position to face this turbulent world.”
For the WP, Singapore’s main opposition party, the results, while not disastrous, were disappointing following the gains of 2020. The WP increased its share of the vote from 11.22 percent in 2020 to 14.99 percent, held onto 10 seats in Parliament, and consolidated its leads in the three electorates that it holds: the Aljunied GRC, the Sengkang GRC, and the Hougang Single Member Constituency (SMC). GRCs are constituencies in which teams of candidates, usually four or five, compete to be elected rather than individual candidates, as in SMCs.
However, the party largely failed to make inroads elsewhere, and its increased vote share was largely cannibalized from other opposition parties, some of whose candidates performed so badly that they lost their election deposits. Some have criticized the WP for not concentrating its resources more effectively, especially in constituencies where it only lost by a small margin, but party leader Pritam Singh said that the party had done “very commendably” given the PAP’s advantages in the current tense international environment.
“I am very proud of the results in Hougang, Aljunied, and Sengkang, where we have consolidated the position of the party,” WP leader Pritam Singh said yesterday.
“I couldn’t be prouder of the team. I think they did a very, very good job. They fought very hard, they tried very hard for each vote, and I think they should be proud of themselves, and I am very proud of them.”
As Singh recognized, the PAP resurgence can perhaps be interpreted as a vote for stability and familiarity at a time of considerable global and regional uncertainty. This has certainly been a consistent message from the PAP. In a Facebook post shortly after the writ of election was issued on April 15, Wong said that Singaporeans needed to decide who should lead the nation into a world that “is becoming more uncertain, unsettled and even unstable.”
“The global conditions that enabled Singapore’s success over the past decades may no longer hold,” he wrote. “That is why I have called this General Election. At this critical juncture, Singaporeans should decide on the team to lead our nation, and to chart our way forward together.”
For now, it is clear that Singaporeans have decided to stick with the tried and true, but whether this pattern holds over the longer term is hard to predict. Certainly, making inroads to the PAP’s hegemonic position in Singaporean politics – the party has held power since independence in 1965 – is the work of decades rather than years, and the past four elections have seen swings for and against the ruling party.
The general election of 2011 saw the PAP’s share of the vote fall to just over 60 percent, and the WP’s representation in Parliament increase from two seats to six. Given the hegemonic standards of the past four decades, the loss of support prompted much internal soul-searching at PAP headquarters. At the 2015 election, the PAP surged back to within 70 percent of the vote, and the WP failed to win any new constituency. Then, in 2020, the PAP’s vote fell back to just over 61 percent and the WP won the Sengkang GRC, its second Group Representation Constituency.
The result of Sunday’s election is certainly consistent with this pattern. Speaking to reporters yesterday, Singh said that such “gyrations” were likely to keep happening.