I had been following the General Election of 2011 with intense interest, right up to the announcement of the results in the early hours of 8 May. There had been much to amaze me, and I just had to write down my thoughts and share them with my readers.

For 17 years, since 1994, I had been writing commentaries on various issues in the Singapore political scene. Whether these were long-standing problems such as the emotional divide between the PAP leadership and the people, or specific issues such as the controversial increase in ministerial salaries, the articles invariably identified the underlying cause as the unrelenting authoritarianism of the PAP government, with all that this implies of stern, punitive measures used by the leaders, and of timid compliance shown by the led.

Even as I made a plea for a political opening up, I could not shake off the pessimism that the PAP’s obsession with control would at best allow only a very limited version or, worse, only a semblance of it.

Now GE 2011 has changed all that.

There were four distinct issues that I had brought up in my commentaries, in all of which I had been proved wrong by GE 2011: Read more