So, min. Shan has already fired back at the Economist and its latest patronising Banyan column about the government transition in Singapore (which is quite ironic coming from a publication based in a largely broken country which is still dreaming of becoming "Singapore on the Thames", and has gone through more prime ministers in 5 years than SG in 60).
Now, people are entitled to their opinions but journalists should at the very least acknowledge what the basic facts are - and here's where Mr. Ziegler, running the column, and reportedly based in Singapore, appears to actually inhabit some sort of a parallel universe.
Yes, among the reasons why PAP is poised to win the next GE (as ever) are, allegedly, its "unrelenting attacks on the opposition". What?
I have been following Singapore's politics for quite some time but I have yet to see a single instance of an overt attack on the opposition, let alone an "unrelenting" wave of them.
There are disagreements, of course, as they occur everywhere in the world, but the many troubles that local opposition parties have found themselves in in recent years are entirely of their own making.
Singapore is free of smears, tabloid sensationalism and abuses of power in pursuit of destruction of political competition, which the West is rife with.
AHTC case started with independent audits. Nobody forced the Workers' Party to employ their supporters, paying them the highest rates in the country, while failing to supervise their work.
Nobody forced Raeesah Khan to lie in the parliament, just like nobody forced Pritam Singh to not do anything about it for two months before police started asking questions, and then make up questionable excuses under oath.
When PAP challenges WP it's, in my observation, on merit - i.e. on the things that the opposition says or claims.
Just like its housing paper from 2019 in which the party expressed concern over overcapacity in HDB construction when in reality it suffered shortages.
Or when its MP, Louis Chua was found to have admitted that the public housing in Singapore is affordable - but only in reports made for his employer Credit Suisse, while his party consistently claimed the opposite to undermine the government and score points with the voters regardless of the facts.
When allegations of extramarital affairs rocked the political scene, they took out WP and PAP members equally. The government didn't use its superior position to somehow save the Speaker, Tan Chuan-jin, just like it didn't save Michael Palmer.
Singapore may have been a more ruthless place in the past, particularly when the communist threat was still very real, but it's not anymore.
In fact, when it comes to civility of political discourse there are few countries in the world that could really match it.
Of course it's pointless to debate other achievements - economic success, public safety, public infrastructure, the most successful housing scheme in history, world class healthcare and education, and so on - since Singapore pretty much crushes every other developed country in each of these categories.
Foreign journalists would do better to try and teach Singapore's success story wherever they came from rather than attempt to knock it down a peg out of what can only be spite and envy.
