Six Months After a Watershed Election: How Is The Dust Settling?
The uniqueness of the General Election (GE) in May 2011, surely never before seen in the electoral history of Singapore, both in the shock of a chastised PAP government and in the unstoppable hostility of a newly energized electorate, was captured by political commentators in any number of breathless epithets—amazing, transforming, phenomenal, cataclysmic, seismic, a watershed, a sea-change.
Today, six months later, the high emotion has subsided, on the part of the PAP, into a gently conciliatory exercise of placation and reassurance, the leaders promising to bring about change and to connect better with the people, and, on the part of the electorate, into an alert, wait-and-see stance.
Among these watchers there must be a fair number of optimists, bright-eyed with excitement, who look forward to a new society led by a government generously turning an election setback into new inspiration and motivation to serve the people better.
There must also be an even larger number of skeptics, narrow-eyed with suspicion, who think that despite the much-publicised post-election ‘soul searching’ by the PAP leaders and their fervent promises of change, the government will remain essentially the same: the ‘new normal’ in their currently adopted slogan, will simply be the old normal cleverly trotted out in a new dress.
As a political commentator who had closely watched the GE (and a few months later, the Elected Presidency Election which saw a continuation, indeed a sharpening, of the people’s anger and disenchantment), I would like to attempt to answer the questions that must be uppermost in the minds of many Singaporeans during this post-GE period: Just what is happening? What can we expect? Will Singapore society be truly transformed? To what extent will those lavish election promises be kept?
Instead of the usual straight political exposition, I thought I could use the dialogue to present the various issues at hand. The interlocutors are the Optimist on one side, and the Skeptic, on the other, each taking a standpoint diametrically opposed to the other’s. The dialogue as a genre has two advantages: firstly, its debating format of proposition followed by rebuttal makes for a focused examination of each issue raised. Secondly, it allows for the authentic tone and emotional flavour of coffee-shop talk and online chatter.
OPTIMIST: Wow, see what the GE has done—cleared away, in one fell stroke, all those things about the PAP that for 50 years we had tolerated—their arrogance, insensitivity to the needs of the people, their elitism. All now a thing of the past. Wow, I didn’t think I would see all this in my lifetime!
SKEPTIC: Hold those ecstatic wows. They are premature.