From a distance it may seem that Singapore's 2025 General Election hasn't changed much. PAP recorded a relatively minor upswing of under 5%, while the opposition has kept its 10 elected MPs plus 2 NCMP seats.
In reality the result is a lot more significant, putting a halt on opposition's progress and questioning all that it has attempted in the past 5 years.
And the biggest losers are the leaders of the two parties that made it to the parliament in 2020, besides the PAP: Tan Cheng Bock and Pritam Singh.
For the former this election means a definitive end to his political career. At 85 it's time for him to retire. It's quite likely that it also puts an end to the existence of Progress Singapore Party, which was thoroughly rejected in the West Coast.
A narrow loss would have been blamed on alleged PAP's gerrymandering, which saw some districts of former Jurong GRC moved west. It could have also allowed them to keep their NCMP seats. But losing by 60% to 40% leaves no doubt that the result would have been negative for the PSP no matter how the constituency boundaries were drawn.
I think people have simply seen what Tan Cheng Bock really stood for after all. Leong Mun Wai's parliamentary antics didn't help and TCB's endorsement of Tan Kin Lian in the presidential race of 2023 must have been a wake up moment for many of the moderate voters.
Instead of a former PAP octogenarian with a chip on his shoulder, they voted for a young Minister for National Development, even after S Iswaran's spectacular downfall.
This is how bad their opinion of PSP was, that even the corruption scandal didn't stop the needle going firmly in the opposite direction.
Pritam Singh keeps failing as leader
Pritam is such an established face in local politics that it's easy to forget this was only his second election in command of the Workers' Party. But his track record isn't great, so far.
Yes, in his first outing WP did win Sengkang which it has kept again this time – but that was down to a fluke that the Jamus Lim effect was.
Let's not forget that together with Jamus he brought in Raeesah Khan, despite her history of inflammatory comments, and then mishandled her lies in the parliament which is still a threat to his political career if he loses the pending appeal.
Weirdly this experience has not discouraged him from seeking even more controversy in 2025.
His attempts at exploiting the war in Gaza started immediately after the Hamas' attack in October of 2023, which he refused to recognised as terrorism until after being grilled in the parliament.
WP hasn't shied away from raising the issue on behalf of some complaining Singaporeans, which led to the recruitment of Alia Mattar, who explicitly said that she joined the party because its MPs would talk about Palestine in the parliament when her PAP MP refused to.
That was just last year. Yes, a total newbie with no experience made it from a volunteer to MP candidate in less than 12 months, and her main motivation was a foreign conflict.
This is how desperate Pritam was to pander to the minority voters, which he calculated could be swayed by the party's stance on Palestine.
To complete the strategy he moved WP's go-to MP for Muslim affairs, vice-chairman Faisal Manap, to contest Tampines GRC, where about 1/4 of the population is Malay.
And they still lost.
Faisal was almost booted from the parliament and is lucky to only be relegated to an NCMP seat, winning it over Chee Soon Juan by just half a percentage point.
But it's not only Pritam's identity politics that failed.
Having invested much time and effort in building up Harpreet Singh as the star candidate of the party, Pritam got cold feet right before the vote and moved him from Marine Parade – where he had been walking the ground for two years – to Punggol GRC (bizarrely mixed together with Alia Mattar).
Well, looks like the senior counsel got his wish but it didn't quite go to plan. To be fair, it's not like he helped his cause after his perplexing ramblings about Singapore saving millions on ministerial salaries if PAP is defeated in Punggol raised eyebrows up and down the island.
This may have been the moment when Singaporeans realised why PAP rejected him 20 years ago.
As I argued here the rushed withdrawal from Marine Parade (granted, a constituency well-staffed by the PAP, but still...) might have soured some voters on WP, showing that it is willing to abandon the people it promised to represent for two years only to exploit a political opportunity somewhere else.
It couldn't have been appreciated in Marine Parade itself – though those Singaporeans didn't even get to vote. But it might not have been welcomed by those in Punggol either, and an unexpectedly strong PAP result in the East Coast GRC suggests the same may have happened there.
The entire message of serving Singaporeans, of being their voice, was destroyed by Pritam playing political checkers (certainly not chess) just days before the vote.
None of his moves worked. His candidates weren't qualified enough, their deployment was questionable at best and even sending out a stalwart Muslim MP out to flip another GRC hasn't made a dent.
WP has only kept its core strongholds + Sengkang where PAP didn't bother to invest in a strong team, knowing that even if it won, WP members would keep their seats through the NCMP scheme, so why risk it?
Seven years after taking over, Pritam's only success remains Jamus Lim. And even he succeeded quite by accident, thanks to a positive TV appearance at the very last minute in 2020.
Every other of his manoeuvres has been an abject failure, with one of them eventually landing him in court. Today, as his strategy for GE25 lies in ruin he has to find new ideas for the five years ahead. But given his insistence on making bad choices, I'm not sure he's going to succeed at it.
