Singapore—A meme comparing the performances of three key politicians in this year’s General Election on July 10 is going viral, and netizens are saying that based on Senior Minister Tharman Shanmugaratnam’s performance, they are ready for him to be Prime Minister.

SM Tharman and People’s Action Party’s (PAP) slate at Jurong Group Representation Constituency (GRC) ended the election with the highest percentage of votes among all the teams that contested this year. After the polls closed on Friday night, the tally from Jurong showed that SM Tharman had gotten 74.62 percent of the vote versus Red Dot United’s 25.38 percent.

Meanwhile, Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong had gotten 71.91 percent of the vote against the Reform Party’s 28.09 percent.

And in East Coast GRC, where Deputy Prime Minister and presumptive successor to PM Lee, Heng Swee Keat, anchored the PAP team, the ruling party only got 53.41 percent of the vote], against a strong Workers’ Party (WP) team’s 46.59 percent.

Based on the results of the sample count earlier in the evening, a netizen named Dezmond Yeo put the percentages from Ang Mo Kio, East Coast and Jurong into one meme.

We are very ready for THARMAN… No 1 again in GE2020! ??

Posted by Dezmond Yeo on Friday, 10 July 2020

It reads “current PM’s margin

future PM’s margin

he barely made it la huh…DPM vs “relatively quiet” NS (WP’s Nicole Seah)

not-ready-for-non-chinese-PM Tharman’s margin

his margins r bigger than both the PM and supposed next PM…just sayin”

Mr Yeo also wrote as a caption, “We are very ready for THARMAN… No 1 again in GE2020!” Mr Tharman’s Jurong team had also gotten the highest number of votes during the 2015 election.

At a forum at the Nanyang Technological University (NTU) on March 28, 2019, DPM Heng had said that older Singaporeans are not ready for a non-Chinese prime minister, which many netizens disagreed with and were unhappy about.

The Deputy Prime Minister had been asked by Assistant Professor Walid Jumblatt Abdullah of NTU’s School of Social Sciences’ public policy and global affairs programme, “Is it Singapore who is not ready for a non-Chinese prime minister, or is it the PAP (the ruling People’s Action Party) who is not ready for a non-Chinese prime minister?”

He replied, “My own experience in walking the ground, in working with different people from all walks of life, is that the views — if you go by age and by life experience — would be very different. I do think that at the right time when enough people think that we may have a minority leader, a minority who becomes the leader of the country, that is something that we can all hope for.”

Mr Yeo’s post has been shared almost 600 times. Commenters on his post also said they are ready for a non-Chinese Prime Minister.

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