In this part two of our report on the New York Times feature entitled “How Singapore Is Creating More Land for Itself”, in which we found interesting anecdotes on the People’s Action Party (P.A.P) and the opposition, here’s one about the resilience of the ruling party.
The New York Times writer said: “In a restless polity, such single-mindedness would earn the ruling party a risky degree of unpopularity, but nothing seems to dent the P.A.P.”
Of course , the P.A.P. won the election in 2011, “even though Singaporeans were angry over housing shortages and an overburdened public-transportation system.”
And it won again, this time against all odds, even more handily in 2015.
This after land prices rose by 30 percent three years in a row and after the government’s migration-led population target of 6.9 million by 2030 — necessary to fill out the work force, but also a strain on the island’s finite resources — kindled a public protest, a singular event in this country.
“But stopping the state from doing something it wants to do is, in Singapore, a task primed for defeat,” wrote Samanth Subramanian, who is a correspondent for The National and the author of “This Divided Island: Life, Death, and the Sri Lankan War.
He said an ‘inert citizenry’ gives the government the freest of hands in confronting climate change, just as it does in every other sphere, far into the foreseeable future.