Nearly a year ago, The Independent Singapore published my column saying Britain is ready for an Indian prime minister, so Singapore should be ready for an ethnic minority prime minister.
Recent events suggest Britain is likely to get its first Indian prime minister sooner than later, while Singapore is seeing a delay in getting a new prime minister, let alone a prime minister from an ethnic minority.
On Nov 28, when Singapore’s ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) held a meeting, Singapore Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong said the country’s fourth-generation (4G) leadership team would “need a little longer” to decide on a successor to him, but expressed confidence they would settle on a successor “well before the next general election”, reported the Straits Times.
Given the next general elections are expected to be in 2025, it is reasonable to assume the 4G team will pick Singapore’s next prime minister within three years by 2024.
Unlike the prolonging of Lee’s premiership, Boris Johnson’s days as British Prime Minister appear to be numbered.
Johnson risks a leadership challenge unless he “gets his act together”, Simon Hoare, a senior Member of Parliament (MP) of Johnson’s Conservative party, was quoted in the Independent saying on November 29.
Hoare criticized Johnson for unsuccessfully trying to tear up anti-sleaze rules in a vain attempt to save Owen Paterson, a former Conservative minister, reported the British newspaper.
Johnson’s government initially blocked the suspension of Paterson for violating British lobbying rules, then reversed its decision after an outcry among the British press, politicians and people. As a result of the U-turn, Paterson resigned as MP.
The outrage at Johnson’s behaviour caused the Labour party to overtake the Conservative party in the polls. The percentage of people who think Johnson is doing badly as prime minister rose from 54 per cent on July 5 to 64 per cent on Nov 22, while the percentage of people who thought he was doing well fell from 39 per cent on July 5 to 29 per cent on Nov 22, according to a YouGov poll.
Piers Morgan, a British journalist, also weighed in on the Paterson scandal. On Nov 13, he tweeted, “Boris ‘laws are made to be broken’ Johnson’s sleazy chickens are coming home to roost. I predict Rishi Sunak will be Prime Minister within a year.”
On Oct 3, Sir Max Hastings wrote a column in the Guardian, saying it was time for Johnson to step down as prime minister. As to who would succeed Johnson as British prime minister, “to many of us, Rishi Sunak seems the only acceptable answer,” wrote Hastings, who was editor of the Daily Telegraph when Johnson was a reporter under him.
Tensions and disagreements over economic policy are building up between Sunak, who is currently Chancellor of the Exchequer, and Johnson, reported the Daily Mail on Nov 25. This is reminiscent of the tension over financial policy between Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad and Deputy Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim in Malaysia during the late 1990s.
If Sunak succeeds Johnson, he will be the first Indian prime minister and the first Hindu prime minister of Britain, which has only had Anglican Christian prime ministers. If that happens, Britain will come a long way since Winston Churchill said of Indian independence leader Mohandas Gandhi in 1931, “It is alarming and also nauseating to see Mr Gandhi, a seditious Middle Temple lawyer, now posing as a fakir of a type well known in the East, striding half-naked up the steps of the viceregal palace, while he is still organising and conducting a defiant campaign of civil disobedience, to parley on equal terms with the representative of the king-emperor.”
By contrast, the top three candidates for Singapore’s next prime minister, namely Lawrence Wong, Chan Chun Sing and Ong Ye Kung, all come from the nation’s majority Chinese population. If one of them gets the job, Singapore will have to wait many more years before it gets its next minority prime minister after David Marshall, a Jew who was Singapore chief minister from April 1955 to June 1956.
A Singaporean Chinese man, Yeoh Lam Keong, said on his Facebook on Nov 13, “IMHO (In my humble opinion) the choice of Tharman (Shanmugaratnam) as our next PM (Prime Minister) would have represented not only a move towards more adequate social protection so badly needed, but also a clear choice to move decisively towards political liberalization and the strengthening of democratic institutions, instead of new legislation like POFMA and now FICA , which is a slippery slope towards more authoritarian government.”
The Protection from Online Falsehoods and Manipulation Act (POFMA) is Singapore’s law against fake news which came into force in 2019. The Foreign Interference (Countermeasures) Act (FICA) was passed in Singapore Parliament on Oct 4 but has not yet taken effect. Critics argue that these two pieces of legislation curtail civil liberties.
“It’s a real pity the PAP chose the wrong road and missed a unique historical opportunity to become a truly more open, progressive and inclusive society and polity,” said Yeoh, who was chief economist of the Government of Singapore Investment Corporation (GIC) when Tharman, now a Senior Minister, was a member of the board of this sovereign wealth fund.
The longer Singapore’s leadership succession drags on, the greater the uncertainty over the country’s political future. Many things can happen in a few years. Although there is no evidence that Prime Minister Lee is in poor health, he survived cancer twice. He was cleared of prostate cancer after treatment in 2015 and had lymphoma in the early 1990s. Lee’s unexpected bout of lymphoma was one reason that Goh Chok Tong was Singapore prime minister for a longer-than-expected 14 years from 1990 to 2004.
I wish Lee more good years, but what if he fell seriously ill or suffers a worse fate within the next few years with no clear successor? Alternatively, what if some form of major crisis hits Singapore, causing Lee to resign without a successor? If either scenario happens, which I hope will not, the uncertainty will be so great that the three Chinese contenders, Wong, Chan and Ong, may not become the prime minister. Instead, I do not rule out the possibility that Singapore Law and Home Affairs Minister K Shanmugam may become Singapore’s first Indian Prime Minister under unforeseen circumstances.
Toh Han Shih is chief analyst of Headland Intelligence, a Hong Kong risk consultancy. The opinions expressed in this article are his own
Read related: UK is ready for an Indian Prime Minister, so should Singapore
UK is ready for an Indian Prime Minister, so should Singapore